


under fire

by deniigiq



Series: Inimitable Verse [9]
Category: Daredevil (TV), Deadpool - All Media Types, Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Alternate Universes, Being Lost, Ducks, Gen, Ghosts, Lost and Found, Team Bonding, Team Dynamics, Team Red, Team as Family, abusing playground privileges, bringing em on home, team someone get me a fucking flow chart there are so many people now, universe jumping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-15
Updated: 2019-03-10
Packaged: 2019-10-29 02:59:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 55,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17799875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: “Woah,” Miles breathed. Except he didn’t. No, the other guy, he’d said that. In Miles’s voice.“It’s another Miles,” Gwen murmured with awe. Another Miles. He had a double. He had a double like Peter did.“Hi,” he said, then felt awkward as hell. How were you supposed to greet your clone? Twin? Alternate universe buddy? Was there a handbook? He needed a handbook.“Hi,” the other Miles said through his mask, then looked down. Miles looked down with him and realized they were still holding hands. They let go at the same time.“You’re me,” the other Miles said. Apparently he’d gotten the handbook.(Someone is trapped in the Spiderverse. Miles, Gwen, and Peter B. find themselves in need of some assistance to rescue them.)





	1. sparks

**Author's Note:**

> WOW.  
> Hi. 
> 
> So. Ya'll are gonna want to read "take cover" and "Inimitable" to understand this. Like. Please do that, there is so much happening.

Ganke had written out and pinned to his bulletin board a list of names which he was now busy reading through so that Miles would understand the full extent of how he felt about him coming in unannounced through the window again.

Ganke was a good guy, a calm guy, the kind of guy you wanted on your team if for no other reason than because his chill in the face of what most people would call insanity was vaguely threatening. He’d stared at Miles straight in the face after they’d finally had a frank conversation about the whole, ‘why do you sneak out at night, every night, like a loser?’ thing and had given him a good squint, up and down.

Miles realized later that in that moment, he’d been weighed, measured, and found severely wanting.

Ganke was not a big fan, nor a huge fan of Spiderman. No, see, that didn’t even begin to cover how Ganke felt about Spiderman. He had every single one of the guy’s comics. He had Spidey t-shirts, jackets, backpacks, keychains, a phone background—he even had Spidey slippers which Miles was gratified to learn were essentially blue, furry monstrosities with eight dragging little legs bursting out from either side of them. Apparently, they were supposed to be 3D versions of the emblem on the back of the original Spidey suit.

Given that this was not a battle he had any chance of winning, Miles decided that he’d keep his thoughts on just how accurate all them little feet were to himself. He ruminated on them, though, while Ganke rattled off some of the new invectives he’d added to the list in Miles’s absence.

They were _so_ blue. Like, blue raspberry sherbet blue. Jolly Ranchers blue.

“Dude, are you even listening?” Ganke demanded.

“Huh?” Miles said reflexively.

Ganke groaned and grumbled and waved a grumpy hand back at Miles over his shoulder to dismiss him from further conversation. It was almost a relief. Except.

“Hey man, guess which dumpster I fell in this time,” he goaded.

Ganke whipped around in his computer chair and produced two pens from his desk to make the sign of the cross at him.

“Touch nothing, demon,” he threatened.

Miles hummed long and thoughtfully.

“I dunno,” he drawled, “I’m feeling a little sad, man.”

“Don’t you dare—”

“A lady called me a menace today, right to my face. Could really use a hug.”

“You _are_ a menace. That is exactly what you are.”

Miles made puppy eyes and pouted big and sad, slowly edging a hand towards the can on Ganke’s desk. Ganke hissed at him. He made a noise of disgust when Miles’s fingers made contact with the can.

“There are easier ways to get a coke, Miles Morales,” he snapped. That was as good as permission. Miles swiped the can and beamed at him. He took a sip, it was flat, but so, so much sweeter with Ganke’s annoyance.

 

 

He emerged from his shower and received clearance to re-enter his and Ganke’s dorm room. He flopped down on his bed, at which point Ganke leaned back in his chair with one headphone on and said,

“Oh, by the way, you got like six messages while you were in the shower.”

Six?

“Yeah, dunno if that’s good or bad.”

He checked. The phone had way more than that. He unlocked the screen.

No messages.

“It’s Gwen,” he said.

“Sending six messages?” Ganke clarified. He had accepted Gwen’s existence the same way he’d accepted Miles’s night job, at first with skepticism, then with a shrug. “She okay?”

Miles never knew, he couldn’t ever open Gwen’s messages. They could only send them to each other. Ten messages was a lot, though, she must have really been trying to get his attention.

“Maybe someone’s dying,” Ganke hypothesized.

Someone’s always dying.

It was nearly three, though; Gwen’s patrol typically ended around then, she’d be going home to sleep soon. Miles would call her after a few hours to reboot.

 

 

Someone was screaming. Far away. So far, it sounded like an echo.

Miles thought he knew that voice from somewhere.

Where had he heard it?

Maybe on tv?

He opened his eyes.

It was black all around him, and blinking didn’t make any difference to that. The usual pulsing charging lights around his dorm were absent, and belatedly, he realized he was standing. He flexed his hands. They didn’t feel warm or cold, just empty. Or not. Was it empty? That felt kind familiar too, somehow.

The screaming seemed like it was getting a little louder, like the buzz at the back of his brain. Miles’s feet started moving towards it. One in front of the other. He didn’t feel like he was walking, more like he was just moving his legs. There was nothing hard beneath them; just a shattering of color.

Color?

It was there, then gone; bursting out each time he set his foot down, like ripples almost, fading away into the blackness almost as quickly as it had arrived.

Wait. He knew this place. Didn’t he know this place? How did he know this place?

The screaming stopped. He stopped, too.

He searched the blackness around him. The colors no longer arced out from his feet.

His hand brushed something and he jerked his head over to see a few fading sparks of gold and teal and florescent pink. They faded off into blackness, nothingness in the space between his fingertips.

He realized muzzily that he couldn’t hear his own breathing, even though he could feel his chest expanding in his shoulders.

Expand. Contract.

Expand. Contract.

Exp—

“HELP.”

 

 

He woke up gasping with the cry ringing in his ears. His heart throbbing in his neck.

Familiar--it was familiar. He knew that voice. He _knew_ that voice, where did he know that voice from?

He threw off his covers and scrambled off the bunk. Ganke had left. Made his bed and gone. It was the weekend, so he’d probably gone home. All his pens were stuffed in the Spidey mug he had on his desk.

“HELP.”

Miles blacked out for a millisecond and blinked back to himself on the floor. He’d dropped off the bed’s ladder.

“HELP, PLEASE.”

The shouts sounded like they were right in his ear. Right next to him. But there was no one else in the room. He staggered up and threw his head out the door to look down the hall.

It was empty.

He jerked back into the room and threw himself half out the window.

There was no one, just a handful of people lazily strolling down in the street below.

“HELP.”

He nearly slipped and cracked his chin against the sill.

“Where are you?” he asked, scrambling up to his feet and trying to find the body of the voice with his face. He turned in circles in the small space between the two desks and the bunkbed in the room. No one was there. It was just him and his socks spinning on carpet. He stopped and listened again. Listened hard.  

 

“HELP.”

 

He leapt a foot in the air and then threw his hands out in front of him; maybe this person—whoever they were--were in camouflage-mode like him. He couldn’t feel anyone, though, he couldn’t feel anything but air. There was a rushing in his ears now, like static. Like glitching. It got louder and louder with each spin he made.

“HELP, HELP, PLEASE, STOP.”

Right in his ears, he swore to god. Right there. Right next to him. But there was nothing, no one.

“WHERE ARE YOU?” he shouted back, desperate; his tone had started to match the other’s. His voice wavered.

And yet there was nothing and no one around him. Just his own stuttered breathing.

Nothing.

Then, an echo. His own words coming back to him from somewhere he couldn’t pinpoint, no matter how hard he looked around the room. Wait, those weren’t his words. No, they were, but that voice wasn’t his. It was—

It was Gwen’s.

“Where are you?” she called, soft and hoarse as though far off in the distance. “Where are you? I want to help you. Where are you?”

Gwen could hear it too then. She could hear the screaming, too. They were—

“Who are you?” another soft voice called in response to Gwen’s shouting. She didn’t seem to hear it, she kept crying out the same question over and over.

“Who are you?” the voice repeated, “Where are you?”

That was Peter--Peter B. Miles hadn’t heard from him in nearly a month; Gwen said he was having some personal life drama which he’d sworn her to secrecy over. He sounded upset. He sounded rushed, like he was running.

“NO.”

The word came like a punch to the head. Miles recoiled at the sudden volume and bumped his back into the bunk bed’s ladder.

“STOP--MAKE IT STOP.”

Putting his hands over his ears didn’t block out even a little of the sound.

In fact, as soon as he did so, a whole chorus of new voices erupted from all around him to join Gwen’s and Peter’s and the person who was screaming’s.

He knew all of them. Peni. Ham. Noir.

He’d never been able to hear all the Spidermen this way before. He could talk to them sometimes, yes, but not in his head, never in his head. It didn’t even feel like any kind of psychic connection, either, it just sounded like people shouting into a dark, winter street in the middle of the night. Where no one was hearing anyone else, nor expecting any answer. But it was light outside. And the contrast between that and the desperation crowding Miles’s ears and head wasn’t just jarring.

It was suffocating.

Even more voices started to join in with the others, voices he’d never heard before. People he didn’t recognize—they had to be other Spidermen. Spideys who hadn’t stepped through their verses before, suddenly reaching out now.

Miles heard his own voice call out. It took him a moment to realize that it wasn’t him, he hadn’t even opened his mouth. It had to be another Miles somewhere, a hero like everyone else, screaming into the emptiness.

“Where are you?” called that other Miles. “I can help you! Tell me where you are!”

I can help you.

“HELP. _PLEASE_ , help.”

Fuck. He slapped his arms over his head.

His heart wouldn’t start pounding, he couldn’t breathe. His fingers had gone cold with panic, and his legs had gone jittery, shaky—like he needed to move. He needed to do something. He needed to help, someone, something, _now._

But then, just like that, it was gone.

Everything was gone.

 

 

He lifted his arms and all he could see were dust motes hovering in the air in the light from the window. A few cars drove down the street outside. A group of people outside were laughing. Someone playing music.

The pulsing in his neck remained, stubbornly throbbing away, undaunted. Miles could feel it more than anything else in his body. His chest heaved as he stared out the window.

Uh-uh. Fuck this. He needed to call someone.

 

 

He reached out to Gwen with shaky hands the way they had learned to and she reached back immediately. They both tore the space between their universes away so they could see each other and just as they did, another hand, painted red and webbed black, joined theirs.

Peter B. threw away the space like a curtain. Miles and Gwen couldn’t even say anything to each other because he looked like he was on the verge of panic. He tore off his mask, and while he always white, but he was never this pale.

“Did you guys hear that?” he asked.

Gwen made a horrible sound and covered her mouth, and Miles realized that she looked like she’d been crying.

“He sounds like _my_ Peter,” she choked out, her face creased and only crumpling more with unshed tears.

The air in Miles’s lungs froze.

Oh, god, no. Don’t be Gwen’s Peter.

Peter B. looked at Miles with wide eyes, then forced himself to take a few deep breaths to get keep himself together. Miles felt like his throat was closing.

“What do we do?” he asked, “We have to help him.”

Gwen choked on a sob. Peter rubbed at his face with more pressure than necessary. It was nighttime in his verse, his suit was lit from behind by streetlights.

“We’ve gotta find him,” he said, dropping his hand, “We’ll find him.”

“How?” Gwen managed to creak out through her distress. “ _How?_ My Peter—he’s dead. I—It’s my fault he’s dead.”

“That’s not true,” Peter B. countered immediately.

“You don’t know that,” Gwen said miserably. Miles reached out to touch her arm, but she jerked back to wipe away tears.

“Gwen, he might not be your Peter,” Peter explained gently, “But he’s definitely one of us. A Spiderman. We need to talk to him.”

“He keeps fading in and out,” Miles said. “And how do we talk to him if we don’t even know where he is? What if—What if—” God, he couldn’t make himself say it. Just the thought made his entire throat ache.

“What if he’s dying?” he finally choked. “What if he’s dying in his verse, and that’s the end of Spiderman for him. Are we allowed— _should_ we interfere?”

Peter went still in shock at the idea. Gwen’s face crumpled again and she gasped into her hand.

“No,” Peter suddenly snapped. His eyebrows dropped low. “No, it doesn’t matter. We’re Spiderman, and Spiderman saves people. Including himself. If this guy’s dying or has to die, then fuck it, whatever. I don’t care. No one said he’s gotta do it alone.”

Miles swallowed again and forced himself to take a deep breath in through his nose. He heard Gwen do the same and when he opened his eyes, saw her letting her shoulders drop like his.

“Okay, you’re right,” Miles said. He set his own eyebrows. “So, how do we do it?”

 

 

“I have no idea,” Peter B. admitted, deflating a little. “Any thoughts?”

The other two wilted as well. Miles pressed his hands against his forehead.

Think.

Think, Morales, come _on. Think_.

Someone’s dying, one of yours.

“HELP.”

They all jumped.

“Fuck,” Peter B. swore. “I can’t with this—BUDDY,” he shouted into the empty alley behind him, “WE’RE GONNA HELP YOU, JUST HANG IN THERE, ALRIGHT?” He turned back to the other two, and Gwen slapped a closed fist onto her palm.

“We need a game plan,” she said, still a little teary, but mostly recovered, “Let’s scaffold this. What do we need to know to find him?”

“Where he is, like physically,” Peter B. offered.

“Which verse  he’s in,” Miles added.

“Okay,” Gwen said, “So we need to locate him first. Then we need to find out what’s happening to him. Then we can go from there. Maybe, if he’s in danger, we can take him through to one of our verses for safe keeping, so he can heal for a bit.”

Miles agreed with that and looked up to see Peter nodding, too.

“So our priority right now is finding him,” Gwen reiterated. “But how can we find him? He sounds like he’s right next to me, like, right here.”

“Me, too,” Miles said.

Peter sighed. He pinched the bring of his nose with his thumb and a knuckle and dipped his head low to think.  

“We need someone who knows how parallel universes work,” he said after a moment, “At least, someone who understands this shit better than us. Like, we don’t know if where I’m standing is the same through all the verses, and I can’t think of any way to verify that without like, opening a window into every verse individually, which is _impossible._ Not to mention that it seems like we’re running on a close time-table here.”

“So like, a scientist?” Gwen asked.

“Yeah. Preferably, an un-mad one. Anyone know any? I can try to get ahold of Stark or Banner or someone on the Avengers, but they’re gonna think I’m fucking _nuts._ ”

The thing was, Miles thought a little hysterically, was that they already probably thought that Peter was nuts since he was a giant red and blue spider who routinely threw himself off the Empire State.

Gwen snapped up to attention.

“We don’t need one of those guys,” she said, “We’ve already got a scientist.”

“We do?” Miles asked at the same time Peter did.

“Peter,” she said.

“Woah, what? No. I’m not—I’m a photographer,” Peter clarified, “A tinker-er at best, I only know as much chemistry and physics as it takes to make my tech not break mid-air.”

“Not _you,_ ” Gwen snipped. “The other Peter.”

“My Peter?” Miles asked.

“No,” Gwen said, ever more exasperated, “No, the other one. We met him. The one with the tattoos.”

A pause.

No, actually that was a _great_ idea.

“You don’t know if he’s a scientist,” Peter B. pointed out hesitantly. “I mean—”

“He said he works as a team lead. He said his staff are intelligent—”

“That doesn’t make someone a scientist, Gwen. He could be a fucking accountant for all we know.”

“No, he works for Stark Industries, I saw the insignia on his coat.”

“ _Lots_ of people work for SI, that’s kind of how corporations work.”

“Wait,” Miles said.

The other two stopped and looked back at him.

“I’ve got his card,” he realized. “Hold on, just a second.” He swung around and started digging through everything on his desk.

Where was it? Where was it?

He hadn’t thrown it out, for sure. He remembered saving it from the trash once when Ganke was on one of his cleaning binges. He took the elevated desk attachment off his desk proper and set it down to sort through the piles of papers, assignments, mail, and what-have-you that he’d stacked in the corner by the pens.

“Miles,” Gwen said with concern.

“No, I’ve got it,” he maintained. He dumped out one of the pen cups and then hissed in triumph.

Lo and behold, there it was.

He swiped it out of the pen carnage and returned to his window reading aloud:

“Peter B. Parker, Research and Development Lead Coordinator, Stark Industries L35-L40. He’s got an email and a phone number—research and development, that’s science right?”

Peter B. mulled this over.

“Well, probably, but we don’t know if this guy knows anything about physics or parallel—”

“If he doesn’t, he’s surrounded by people who do and he can ask them without drawing attention to himself,” Gwen interrupted. “How do we get him?”

Well, they’d talked to this Peter two times before, but that was only two times.

“Did you teach him how to open a window?” Miles asked.

They had not.

Damn.

“Maybe he’ll get the hang of it,” Gwen said, “He’s opened one before. Let’s just try?”

 

 

It was a weird thing to do, reaching out to other Spideys. It was probably a physicist’s worst nightmare, actually, given that you had to reach out into the space between verses and all concepts of normal and good and rational went right out the window, so to speak. Obviously, since none of them were physicists and therefore had little regard for the proper order of things, it wasn’t so bad. It wasn’t warm or cold or anything, it just felt like a lurch. Like you were stuck in the swing of a rollercoaster. Anything that went into that space glitched all over. Again, it wasn’t painful, you just had to get used to it, and you also had to have a very clear idea of who it was that you were reaching out to in order to make contact. Miles could reach out to any of the Spideys he’d already met before, provided he remembered what they looked like. The trickier part was that they had to reach back to open the window.

If the other Peter didn’t reach back, then they were screwed, and Miles didn’t know if the guy knew to be tuned into the signs that someone from another verse was trying to get his attention.

Regardless, they had to try, and try they did.

The other Peter was easy to bring back to the front of his mind because the guy had had sleeves of tattoos on his forearms. He had geometric work, a plane of neatly aligned and overlaid circles from wrist to elbow on one arm with a burst of daffodils overtop that. Miles remembered because, well, he was an artist, he had an eye for these kinds of things, but also because that Peter had also opted not to get the flowers inked in color. This, Miles thought was a bit strange, given that the whole point of daffodils was their color. He couldn’t remember what was on the guy’s other arm as clearly since he’d been mesmerized by the circle design (which, he saw now, was probably the point), but that didn’t matter, he had the first sleeve, that was a good start.

He thought he remembered that Peter looking a bit younger than Peter B., maybe around the same age as the Peter in his own verse before he’d died. He had a squarer jaw and a more heart-shaped face and—

“Did he have blue or brown eyes?” he asked Gwen.

“Brown,” Peter B. sniffed. Well, okay, Miles wasn’t going to ask how he knew so confidently.

He took the brown and tried hard to put everything together. Brown eyes, sweetheart face, daffodil tats.

Brown eyes. Sweetheart face. Daffodil tats.

He felt the space give a little under his hands and he pushed them through the air until they sunk into the space in between.

He held them still and steady, trying to keep the picture in his head.

He waited.

And waited.

 

 

Nothing.

No one reached back.

 

 

“Fuck,” Peter B. swore after both he and Gwen had given it a shot, too. “Alright, no. It’s fine, I’ll just go ask Banner and tell him I’m thinking about grad school again and he’ll do the thing where he mashes my face and—”

“Wait no,” Gwen yelped, startling them both. “Messages, we can send him messages, he’s got an email! Miles and I send messages all the time.”

Peter paused to direct a skeptical eyebrow at each of them individually.

“Messages,” he repeated. “Like, texts?”

“Yeah, we can send them,” Miles explained, getting excited with Gwen, “I can’t open them, I don’t know about Gwen. But I can’t open them. I just know when I get them to reach out to her.”

Gwen bobbed her head along with his words, eagerly staring up at Peter’s frown.

He seemed to process this information for a second, then threw up his hands.

“Why the hell not?” he said, “Why don’t we do this, we’ll send him some emails—here, lemme take a picture of that card—and I’ll talk to folks ‘round here anyways, on the off chance that he doesn’t answer.”

“How many?” Miles asked, and at the others’ twin blank looks, clarified, “How many emails should we send, like? If his verse is like mine, he can’t open them, so how many do we send so that he knows it’s us?”

Gwen and Peter thought about it.

“666?” Gwen offered. Peter scoffed at her.

“616?” she amended.

“Gwen, no. Ain’t no one got time to send that many emails,” he groaned.

“How about a hundred?” Miles offered. “Or 99. We each send 33, and that’s a super intentional number to get. You can’t ignore 99 emails.”

“Unless he gets 200 emails on the regular for his job, but sure, whatever, we need to get moving. _Now_. We don’t know how long our pal’s got left,” Peter said.

He was right.

 

 

 **To:** pbparker@si.org

**CC: ____**

**Subject:** Please contact

 

 Hi Mr. Parker,

This is Miles. You helped me find a lawyer to get my dad out of jail a while back. I don’t know if you can hear him like we can, but there’s one of us, another Spiderman, who’s in trouble. He needs our help. We need your help to help him. Please contact us the way we talked before.

Get in touch with us soon as possible, please, please, please. We think he might be dying.

Thank you,

Miles

 

 


	2. forget him

He didn’t answer.

Ten hours went by and there was nothing.

Nada.

They reconvened; this time it was light in Peter B’s verse and dark in Miles’s and Gwen’s.

“Maybe he’s sick or hurt or there’s something big happening in his verse,” Gwen thought out loud miserably.

Miles understood. It was hard on the heart to think that another Spidey could be so callous. Peter sighed and pushed himself up from where he’d parked himself the edge of a concrete barrier. He was up high somewhere, Miles could see part of a city scape behind him.

“Forget him,” he said, “We’ll do it ourselves. We’ve got the three of us, Ham, Peni, and Noir. We’ve done something like this before, we can do it again.”

Miles gathered himself from his disappointment. These things do happen, his mom always said. He shook himself and nodded with a set jaw. Plan B. Okay.

“We can do this,” he said. Peter gave him a grin.

“Now that’s the spirit. Alright, so I talked to Banner and he said—”

“No.”

Peter stopped and both he and Miles turned to Gwen who had her brow set and fists clenched.

“This _will_ work,” she said. “I believe in him. He will answer.”

“Gwen, honey. Sometimes shit just doesn’t work out,” Peter B. started.

“I’m not your fucking ‘honey,’” Gwen snarled, “This guy’s been sobbing in my head for _hours_ now, and I _know_ this other guy can help. He’s a Spiderman, he’s got to—”

She stopped. Looked around in surprise.

“Did you feel that?” she asked.

Uh, no?

“I—hold on—Peter? Is that you? Hold on, let me,” she pushed her hands forward and the space around them rippled a little bit.

“Peter?” Gwen asked again, pressing a little more. Her fingers finally sunk into the space, but it didn’t seem to come back like it was supposed to. She gave a good couple of tugs before whipping her head back to him and Peter.

“Something’s wrong. Help me.”

Miles’s fingers buzzed as they sunk into the space, and Gwen was right, it felt unusually thick, as though they were trying to peel back a huge layer of clay. It had never felt so heavy before. Miles closed his eyes and tried to picture that Peter again. Daffodils and optical illusions.

Daffodils and optical illusions.

Daffodils and—

A hand met his and they all three leapt back in shock.

“Wait, no!” A voice barked from somewhere in front of them. A whole forearm came through before the space could close. It was thin and spindly and coated in a thin black material. Gwen collected herself first and threw herself back into opening the window with twice as much vigor. Miles lunged forward after her and Peter took the opposite side to do the same when they heard on the other side of the window,

“Angel, _help me._ ”

“Help you, _what?”_

“Just help me, damnit!”

Another set of hands, wrapped in black and accompanied by a truckload of swearing suddenly joined the mix. They didn’t—it was hard to describe. They didn’t seem like they made it through the window like the other hands did.

“Wait! Miles, come here,” Peter suddenly demanded as he tried to wrangle the opening of the window over Gwen’s head.

Miles switched sides with Gwen by ducking under her arm in front of her and Peter grabbed his hand and then the one trying to hold the window open from the other side and slapped them together.

The window fell through and Miles fell with it.

It widened into the usual size, and Miles found himself face to face with a black Spidey suit. One just like his.

 

 

“Woah,” Miles breathed.

Except he didn’t. No, the other guy, _he’d_ said that. In Miles’s voice.

“It’s another Miles,” Gwen murmured with awe.

Another Miles. He had a double. He had a double like Peter did.

“Hi,” he said, then felt awkward as hell. How were you supposed to greet your clone? Twin? Alternate universe buddy? Was there a handbook? He needed a handbook.

“Hi,” the other Miles said through his mask, then looked down. Miles looked down with him and realized they were still holding hands. They let go at the same time.

“You’re me,” the other Miles said. Apparently he’d gotten the handbook. He sounded awed, but not stupid.

“Yeah, but taller,” another voice said. Miles looked up and was surprised to see another Spiderman standing there, behind the other Miles’s right shoulder. His Spidey Sense hadn’t noticed her for some reason, that was weird; it was going off like crazy now with the other Miles in front of him. That Spiderman was definitely a she, and Miles found himself wondering if maybe she was an alternate Gwen—they hadn’t found an alternate Gwen yet, had they?

Or maybe she was a different Spiderwoman altogether? Either way, she was very petit and her suit was layered at the joints with black elbow and knee pads. Kind of like a roller derby gal. She definitely had that aura; like she was the kind of person who’d bodily throw you out of the rink and then tell you to stop crying about it already.

“No one asked you,” the other Miles spat over his shoulder.

Was that animosity he sensed going on there?

“He’s got better hair, too,” the Spidey noted.

“Literally no one fucking asked you,” the other Miles snapped.

The roller derby Spidey gasped way loud and clapped her gloves onto the sides of her mask.

“I’m telling Wade you said ‘fuck,’” she announced.

“Hi, sorry,” Peter interrupted. “Don’t mean to butt in here, but are you guys—do y’all happen to know a guy named Peter Parker?”

Both the other Miles and the roller derby Spidey went silent and rigid. Their suit eyes got _huge_.

“Get up,” the roller derby Spidey ordered her buddy, all traces of humor gone from her voice. He did, immediately and without question. He stepped back with her.

“No, no, no,” Peter said. “It’s not like that, he’s—I’m—Wait, here, see for yourselves.” He pulled off his mask and the other two startled back like a pair of offended birds. They huddled in close and started whispering frantically at each other, sending Peter occasional furtive looks.

“Listen, I’m a Peter Parker, too,” Peter tried to tell them over their whispering. “You guys, you’re on his team, right?”

The whispering halted for a second, then went from frantic to furious. Peter glanced at Miles and then Gwen for support. Gwen decided to take one for the team.

“Hey, we’re not like, trying to pick a fight or anything, really. I promise. We just really need to talk to your Spiderman, uh. Your main Spiderman? It’s really important, do you know where he is? Or maybe where we could find him?”

The other two’s suit eyes went even wider and stayed that way when they looked at each other.

“We buried him,” the derby Spidey announced just as the other Miles said, “He died.”

…what.

WHAT.

“He…died?” Gwen asked. Miles could hear his own disbelief in her voice.

“Yeah,” the derby Spidey said nonchalantly. “Sorry, man. Held his funeral last week. It was a whole thing.”

“A huge deal,” the other Miles agreed. “Streamers and everything.”

“Cake,” the derby Spidey added.

“No beer,” the other Miles said, forlornly. “He never liked beer.”

Peter went through every stage of grief and came out on the other side pissed.

“Are you kidding me? This isn’t a game, you two,” he said, “This is—”

“Life or death?” the derby Spidey poked.

“Sickness or health?” the other Miles goaded _like an asshole, wow._

“Someone is _dying_ ,” Peter B. said, “And he needs our help. Now. So if you don’t want to—”

“Someone is always dying,” the derby Spidey said over him, suddenly serious again. “Get fucked, big guy, we’ve already too many people got our team.”

Wait.

Wait, wait, wait.

This—this Spidey had a team, that was right! He said he had four Spidermen on his team.

“Hey,” he said to the other Miles, “Did—did your Spidey tell you about the Spiderverse?”

The other Miles went rigid. He definitely had.

“No.”

“This has to do with the Spiderverse,” Miles told him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the other Miles stated, staring him down with the whites of his eyes.

“You do—”

“Hey, kid. Lay the fuck off,” the derby Spidey snarled.

Yikes. She was scary.

“The fuck you want with our Spidey?” she demanded.

“I thought he was dead,” Gwen pointed out; she moved in front of Miles the way the derby Spidey had moved in front of her own.

The derby Spidey twisted her face dangerously to Gwen.

“You wanna go, princess?” she growled.

Holy shit. _Angry_ Spidey.

“Woah, alright, break it up,” Peter said putting his own body between both of their and holding a hand in each direction. “This is not kind, necessary, _or_ helpful. We are all on the same team here.”

“Fuck your team,” the derby Spidey spat. “I ain’t know you from Adam, pal. Talkin’ like you fucking know us.”

“Little Spidey,” a new voice barked. “Stand down.”

And thank Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

Hello, Spiderman.

 

 

The Spiderman with the tats really had a certain kind of presence to him in his verse. His suit was absurdly red. And absurdly blue. As though he’d walked into a fabric store and said, ‘yes this, but at 2000% saturation.’ He held himself with a stiff, flat back and his arms out at his sides with his hands open.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, low and dangerous, and at first Miles was shocked by the personality shift, but then he realized what was going on here.

Tats Spidey thought they were trying to fight his team. _His_ team.

No one messed with his team, apparently, and came out on the other end unscathed.

Woah. That was some dedication right there.

“Easy, man,” Peter said, now directing his own open palms his way. “We’re not here to fight.”

“You fuckin’ sure?” Tats Spidey demanded, “’Cause the way I see it, you’re over here menacing my fuckin’ kids.”

“Hey, easy, easy. We don’t want shit from your kids, we were just asking where you were,” Peter said.

Tats Spidey’s shoulders didn’t unhunch and he didn’t look behind him, when he asked,

“Bitsy, that true?”

The other Miles stayed statue-still.

“No, it’s true,” he sighed, while deflating. As he dropped his shoulders, Tats Spidey blinked, then stood up out of his hunch. He turned back to the other two with his hands suddenly on his hips.

“Y’all are pickin’ fights _again_?” he barked. “Come on, we talked about this.”

“They started it,” Little Spidey? Countered immediately.

“Yeah, I’ll believe that when I see it.”

“WOW.”

“Girl, have you met you? You’d fight God if you could.”

“Yeah, and? That bitch and me got problems.”

“Angel, _no_.”

“Angel, _yes.”_

What was happening? What was even happening? Miles looked to Gwen and Peter and found them as gob-smacked as himself.

Tats Spidey had stomped over to Little Spidey and given her a firm shove on the shoulder. He seemed to have a lot to say about her temper and she seemed to take strong issue with his assumption that God was not inherently a bitch.

The other Miles seemed to droop further and further into the ground and Miles realized at the same time that Peter realized, based on his face, that _he_ was the most sensible and mature member of the party before them.

Like.

What?

“Hey, can we not?” Bitsy Miles called over at the other two.

They both jolted his way in sudden silence and he kind of flinched and put up a defensive shoulder.

“I’m just saying; these guys were all panic-y and stuff a minute ago, so like, _maybe_ we should hear them out before we get to the curb-stomping again?”

Oh god, Bitsy Miles was the superior Miles. Miles would never live up to that standard.

“Curb-stomping?” Peter repeated in horror.

“That was _one time_ , Bitsy,” Tats Spidey defended.

“Yeah, a whole one time you nearly got your ass tanked.”

Tats Spidey threw up his arms.

“You’re all insubordinate,” he declared. “All of youse. I’m leaving. Figure it out yourselves. I got better things to do than stand around being insulted all night.”

“It’s okay, Spidey, Louis still loves you,” Little Spidey reassured him.

“I’m moving to Alaska.”

“As if you’d last two minutes in Alaska.”

If he was any faster, Tats Spidey would have snapped his own neck.

“You wanna fucking bet?”

“Guys,” and even _newer_ voice said, “I thought we were meeting in Midtown. This is not Midtown.”

This Spidey was _so_ tall, oh my god. How?

“Louis,” Tats Spidey tattled, pointing at finger at Little Spidey, “These two are antagonizing me.”

Louis’s suit was a toned down version of Tat’s Spidey’s; he didn’t have elbow or knee pads. His voice was soft and his accent reminded Miles of his cousins’ up in the Bronx.

“Hey, you two, be nice,” Louis chided. Bitsy Miles relaxed even more and came forward to duck under Louis’s arm while Little Spidey mugged up at Tats Spidey hard and he mugged smugly back down at her. Louis turned to meet Peter’s shell-shocked face and his suit-eyes widened a bit in surprise before settling back down.

“Oh wow, Spidey wasn’t kidding,” he said good-naturedly. “There really are a lot of you. Some of them even tall.”

“LOUIS, HOW COULD YOU?”

Tats Spidey was devastated and just like, beyond dramatic. Given the giggling of the other Miles and Little Spidey, it was now exceedingly clear that he was the main object of bullying on this team. They were a lot. They were hilarious. Now that they weren’t trying to kill them, Miles decided that he liked them all in their own ways. Gwen seemed to, too, as she was trying to hide her own giggling.

Peter wasn’t so sure.

“This is your team?” he verified slowly. Tats Spidey paused in his flailing to address him.

“Yes,” he said. Then thought twice of it. “Well, actually no. This is part of the team. This is the Spidey part of the team.”

“Right. Because there’s more.”

“Yeah, there’s Wade,” Little Spidey added. Tats Spidey shoved her without looking.

“We got three others,” he said.

“Four if you include Spidey Monkey,” Bitsy Miles said thoughtfully before throwing himself into Louis’s other side so as not to catch hands from Little Spidey.

“We’re _not_ speaking of it,” she snarled menacing him through Louis anyways.

“Spidey Monkey,” Peter repeated.

“We’re not speaking of it,” Tats Spidey solemnly agreed.

“Right. So instead you’ve got?”

“Oh. Me, Louis, Little Spidey, and Bitsy,” Tats Spidey introduced, pointing as he went.

Miles kind of wanted to know why Louis didn’t have a codename. Or maybe ‘Louis’ was his code name? He looked up at the guy and he looked back and gave a kind wave.

Louis was cool. Louis could stay.

“Right, so. We’re me, Miles, and Gwen,” Peter said. “And we seriously need your help if you can spare it.”

Tats Spidey cocked his head and put his hands back onto his hips.

“I mean, I probably can’t. But shoot, can’t be as bad as moving to Alaska, whatever it is.”

 

 

Tats Spidey and his whole team had fallen silent while Peter tried to explain. All of their masks kind of twitched a little around the eyes every so often and Miles and Gwen couldn’t decide if that was a positive indicator or a negative one. At one point, all of the auxiliary Spideys placed their hands on Tats Spidey while he made a super sad noise, like his heart was breaking.

“So, we were hoping that—”

“Guys we have to help them,” Tats Spidey burst out, twisting out of his whole team’s grip and flailing at them. “This Spidey could be _dying_? What if he’s _dying?_ ”

The other Spideys were not impressed, which Miles didn’t quite know how to interpret. Most of the Spiderpeople he’d met so far were huge softies under those dark, edgy exteriors. When they even had those.

“Peter, Wade said you’re not allowed to do anything stupid for forty-eight hours,” Louis said.

“Forty-eight, schmorty-eight, I’m chill. I’m _fine_. Look at me, I’ve never been better,” Tats Spidey declared. Which was horrifying.

What on earth had he been doing?

“Dude, you got hit by a truck,” Little Spidey pointed out.

“Yeah, like, _days_ ago. I’m cool. We’re good.”

Good god. Miles took it back. He looked up at Peter who’s eyebrow appeared to have gotten stuck in the middle of his forehead.

“ _Wade said_ ,” Little Spidey maintained.

“Wade’s fucking old, he don’t know shit.”

Uh-huh. Keep talking, sir.

Bitsy Miles perked up and saw Miles, Gwen, and Peter staring anxiously behind their group. He looked behind him. His whole body flinched like he’d been electrocuted and the huge man behind him slapped a hand over his mouth before he could say anything.

“Wade knows more than you,” Little Spidey argued, unaware of what was happening next to her and jabbing a finger up at her mentor.

“Yeah, no you’re right. He knows a whole lot of nothin’.”

“That’s still more than you.”

“Wow.”

“Pete.”

Tats Spidey went dead still. Slowly, slowly he lifted his head to meet the white, empty-eyed gaze of the man who Miles knew in his verse as Deadpool. The guy he avoided like the plague.

Some things you didn’t have to be taught.

This Deadpool was possibly even bigger than the one who occasionally made the news in Miles’s verse. He didn’t seem as violent or unhinged though. He wasn’t screaming or anything, more like just standing, gently petting Bitsy Miles’s head while he tried to escape. Despite this, Miles glanced over and saw that Peter appeared to be experiencing full-body shivers.

His Spidey Sense was not having this Deadpool.

“Oh _hey_ ,” Tats Spidey said. “Fancy meeting you here, Wade.”

Wade—was that Deadpool’s name? Miles couldn’t decide if it suited him or not—released Bitsy Miles and crossed his giant arms with a hum. Tats Spidey became visibly nervous.

“Talkin’ shit, Pete?” Wade asked good naturedly.

“No,” Tats Spidey lied.

“Ah, ‘course not,” Wade hummed. “Hey, Pete. I thought I tied you to your fuckin’ bed; was that not a thing I did _two hours_ ago?”

Silence.

“I got thing,” Tats Spidey said, thumbing over his shoulder.

“Oh,” Deadpool said kindly.

“Yeah, it’s kind of a deal, you know? Lots of uh, things. Important ones. To do. Right now. Anyways, peace, y’all. Good work tonight, think Imma hit the hay early tonight.” He didn’t so much edge away as make a break for it, only to be captured immediately not two seconds into the attempt.

“WADE, PEOPLE ARE DYING,” Tats Spidey shrieked against Wade’s back, shoving at his head as the guy started steadfastly off in the direction of the park exit. The remaining three Spideys on the team watched this with an air of bemusement.

“Yeah, babycakes, that would be you.”

“Other Spideys! Remember? The fever dream—I told you about the fever dream.”

“The one with the lady octopus person, yes I remember her.”

“There were so many Spideys!”

“Don’t worry, boo. We’re gonna get you your meds soon.”

“ _Double D_ would let me.”

Deadpool stopped in his tracks and then held Tats Spidey in front of his face like naughty puppy.

“Would he?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Shall we ask him, then?”

“No.”

“Hmm. Funny, that’s exactly what I thought you’d say.”

Something happened over there which Miles couldn’t track, which made Deadpool swear and resulted in Tats Spidey scampering back over to grab at Peter’s shoulders and shake them.

“How can we help?” he asked.

 

 

Tats Spidey sat on the merry-go-round in deep thought while the rest of them sat on its edges or, in Wade’s case, crooned at the rogue ducks chilling in the park fountain. He’d named one Sylvester and seemed to be trying to convince it to pick a fight with the big white goose paddling serenely on the other side of the little gardenscape.

Miles wasn’t positive that ducks understood human speech but couldn’t help but be transfixed by Wade’s instigating anyway.

Peter, on the other hand, couldn’t seem to decide what required his adult supervision more, the impending coup or Tats Spidey’s unnerving silence. He made the executive decision, after a few minutes, to hit two birds with one stone and lobbed a handful of web at the duck which scared it off back towards its flock and brought Tats Spidey back to earth.

“I got an idea,” he announced.

The rest of his team went from calm to hella suspicious in a millisecond.

“Does it involve violence?” Bitsy Miles asked.

Tats Spidey scoffed.

“No.”

“Any type of vehicle?” Louis chimed in.

“What? No.”

“Are we gonna fight God?” Little Spidey asked.

Tats Spideys suit eyes locked on her.

“Say that again,” he said. Little Spidey got a little nervous.

“We’re gonna fight God?” she tried again.

Tats Spidey went blank again for a few seconds, then threw himself off the merry-go-round and tackled Wade so that he nearly became one with the man-made pond.

“Phone, phone, phone,” he chanted.

“Buzz off, you’ve got your own,” Wade scolded.

“Phone, phone, _phone_ —I got an idea, give it here!”

“Idea first,” Wade said, producing said phone and holding it high above Spidey’s head. Tats Spidey stood on his toes to try to reach it. Then jerked away, scowling.

“Bitsy,” he barked. Bitsy Miles stiffened to attention. “Can you hear the Spidey in your head?”

“Which one?” Bitsy Miles asked. “Angel’s voice calling me a dumbass is kind of part of my subconscious now.”

“The scream-y one.”

“Yeah, like I said, Angel’s v—”

He got shoved off the swing but took it with grace.

“The ‘help’ guy?” he clarified.

“That’s the one,” Tats Spidey said. He rounded on Miles next.  “Itsy, can you hear the voice?”

It..sy?

“Yes, you. Can you hear it or no?”

Why ‘Itsy?’

“Because Bitsy’s that one and y’all are twins. You. Voice. Hear?”

“Yeah, of course,” he said, still feeling kind of slapped stupid by this new nickname.

Tats Spidey rounded on Gwen and Peter and then interrogated Louis and Little Spidey who revealed that no, actually, they couldn’t hear anything. Which took Miles, Gwen, and Peter aback.

“I thought all Spideys would be able to hear him,” Gwen said. “Everyone was calling. Are you guys sure? It felt a little like dream at first. Like, everything was black and then he was shouting right in your ear.”

Little Spidey and Louis exchanged looks and then referred back to Tats Spidey.

“Maybe you have to be spider food to hear it,” Little Spidey said. Louis hummed in agreement and Gwen froze in shock.

“You guys aren’t enhanced?” she asked. Both of them shook their heads.

“We’re just badass,” Little Spidey said.

And holy _shit_.

No way.

That was.

Miles couldn’t believe that. That was crazy talk. Those two—they were just normal humans. But they were Spidermen—but they were normal humans?? How did that even work? They had to be like, athletes or martial artists or _something_ , they couldn’t just be normal people. They were out here with Tats Spidey which meant they were taking on bank robbers and muggers and people with knives and guns and chemical weapons and shit.

“Alright so, everyone gather round,” Tats Spidey said. No, Miles had whiplash. He couldn’t deal with that right now. Those were normal people who were about to—that’s must have been why Little Spidey couldn’t help Bitsy Miles with the window back there. She wasn’t a Spiderman like Bitsy Miles was, so she couldn’t open a window between verses.

“So,” Tats Spidey said with his hands out in front of him, “I think we’re experiencing a type of clairvoyance.”

Wait, nope. He had Miles’s attention, now.

There was a long pause, then all the Team Red Spideys recoiled in disgust.

“Not this shit again, huh-uh. No more magic,” Little Spidey declared over top her compatriots’ similar complaints.

What the _fuck_ had happened to all these people?

“Everyone pipe down,” Tats Spidey barked over them.

“I thought you were a scientist,” Gwen said uneasily.

“I am,” Tats Spidey said. “And the one does not necessarily disqualify the other, yadda, yadda, yadda, insert religion versus science versus spirituality debate here—but! More importantly, we—all us spider bites—we can hear this guy. And none of y’all normals and Wades can, and this is happening across universes, which shouldn’t be physically possible, if we’re being honest here. So it’s either interdimensional communication using a _device_ of some type, which we don’t have time to study or dig up, _or_ we’re all clairvoyant morons, which at this point would not surprise anyone, anywhere. And if we’ve got this gift, so to speak, or this connection, if that word helps you sleep better at night, with each other on all these different planes, why can’t we just ask this dying Spidey where he is and what he needs?”

Peter huffed.

“We’ve all been doing that, kid. But he doesn’t answer us.”

Tats Spidey rounded on him and whipped a finger right into his face as though it was the point of a knife.

“Exactly,” he said. “That’s exactly it. We’ve been talking to _him_ , but that’s not how clairvoyance works. You need a _medium_.”

Silence.

Miles decided he was worried about this man. Bitsy Miles just sighed and held his head in his hands as though he was embarrassed.

“A medium,” Peter repeated.

“Yes, yes, that’s what I said.”

They let this sink in.

 “Okay. Sure, why not?” Peter said diplomatically. “So we are all mediums now? Is that what you’re—”

“NO. No. Listen to me,” Tats Spidey said. He didn’t sound angry or frustrated, or anything like that, which Miles thought was probably a good thing. That didn’t mean he was making any sense, which in itself really suited a full grown man once again using a merry-go-round as his pulpit, but sure. The enthusiasm was a little heartening.

“A medium,” Tats Spidey emphasized, “We need a medium. Something which we in this space and people in another place can mutually use to communicate. A phone or like—a Ouji board, example. We talk to spirits and shit all the time, us people do, but they don’t talk back because they _can’t_. They have to use a kind of object or other kinds of language—feelings: cold, hot, sad, happy—to get through to us. We don’t have a Oija board or anything between us Spideys, though, so we’ve gotta work out how to use this connection thing as a medium. Which is why—”

He turned to Wade with his hand held out insistently.

“Phone.”

 

 

“So help me fucking God, I will maim you and every one of your brethren, Wade Wilson,” was how the Matt Murdock in this verse answered his phone.

Okay, so there were some trade-offs between these universes, Miles understood that. You can’t have all the best versions of people all in one place, that would be boring. Gwen vibrated next to him and he remembered abruptly that her Matt Murdock was a huge dick. He squeezed her shoulder and she shivered.

“Matt, how do you talk to God?” Tats Spidey asked, like that was a normal question people asked other people.

There was a long pause on the other end as Mr. Murdock apparently processed the fact that this was not Deadpool calling him.

“You go to fucking church, Peter; where’s Wade? Did you throw him off a bridge again? We’ve talked about this, kid, I know he’s annoying, but drowning’s the worst way to go.”

Peter B. had a fist pinned over his mouth and looked nothing less than deeply concerned about this Mr. Murdock. Miles thought that that worry was maybe a little bit misplaced because one of those questions had ended with the word ‘again,’ and its subject had not been Mr. Murdock.

“He’s here. He’s alive. He’s busy with avian war-mongering. And I get that, the whole church thing. I guess the better question is: how do you know God’s talking to you?” he asked.

It was not the question Miles expected him to ask; judging by the others’ faces, it wasn’t the question they’d expected him to ask either.

The Mr. Murdock on the other side of the line seemed stumped for a minute.

“What like, in general, or when I’m being a fuckhead?” He asked. Peter B. recoiled at the word. Or maybe just the voice saying it. His Mr. Murdock must not have sworn much.

“Is there a difference?” Tats Spidey asked.

“Yeah, kid. One of them’s called karma.”

Tats Spidey laughed.

“Okay, the other one,” he said.

“Who the ever-loving _fuck_ are you talking to at this hour?” Mr. Nelson’s voice interrupted from a distance.

“Pete,” Mr. Murdock said back to him, “Go back to sleep, no one’s dead.”

“Peter, are you dying?” Mr. Nelson asked, louder now, like he’d confiscated the phone.

“Can confirm, not dying,” Tats Spidey said, “In the middle of a highly pertinent, time sensitive theological discussion with your husband, however.”

There was a pause on the other line, followed by sound of disgust, an ‘oof,’ and a ‘why are you mad? I didn’t even do anything.’ This was all followed by a loud rustle and Mr. Murdock returned to the phone.

“Time sensitive?” he asked.

“Yes. God. Talking. Explain please,” Tats Spidey said.

“Time sensitive, though?”

“Matt, focus.”

“Matthew, go proselytize in the living room,” Mr. Nelson growled.

“Alright, alright, I’m going.” Rustling and the sound of a door shutting. “Seriously, what’s going on, Pete? You need help?”

“Many things, mostly a puzzle which I am on the cusp of solving. And yes, you can help by answering the question. How does God talk back to you?”

Mr. Murdock was quiet for another long moment, thinking about it.

“I don’t know if he does?” he said, “I mean, that’s kind of the point of faith, Pete. You believe that He’s listening, so—”

“When was the last time you felt like you were talking right to God?” Tats Spidey interrupted, impatient. “Like He was absolutely hearing you?”

Mr. Murdock, surprisingly, didn’t take offense at the interruption, he just went quiet again.

“To be perfectly honest, kid,” he finally said, “The last time I really felt heard was when everything was like, coming down around me. Rock bottom. So what, two years ago? Three? When Fogs got sick and all that other shit started piling on. Lost my mind out at the docks once, bleeding out and screaming at the sky. I’m surprised no one sanctioned me. I felt pretty damn close to God then, pretty sure of His complete rejection of me, anyways. Said some pretty horrible things. It took me _weeks_ to work off those Hail Marys.”

“Everything was coming down around you,” Tats Spidey repeated, tapping his middle finger on the space right under his lip. Wade returned to their group with a duck tucked placidly under his arm. He let Little Spidey pet it.

“Peter, are you thinking?” Mr. Murdock suddenly said firmly. “Why are you thinking? I don’t like that. Whatever it is you are thinking of doing, don’t do it.”

“Thanks Double D, you’ve been super helpful,” Tats Spidey said.

“Peter, No. No, wait. DoN’T HANG—”

He hung up.

“I’ve got it,” he said with a grin.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> alright to keep us all on course:
> 
> Miles = ITSV Miles  
> Bitsy Miles = Inimitable Miles  
> Peter = ITSV Peter B.  
> Tats Spidey = Inimitable Peter


	3. practical fears

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> references to IniPeter's self harm behaviors and general disregard for his own well being. Please do what you need to to keep yourselves safe.

“We gotta drop a house on me,” Tats Spidey announced to the group.

Everyone took the opportunity to chew on this for a second. Wade even went still with his new duck friend in his arms.

“How about not?” he offered.

“No, we gotta do it,” Tats Spidey said, hopping off the merry-go-round and taking the duck right out of his buddy’s arms. It didn’t even flap at him, if anything, it hunkered down like it had found the comfiest roost ever.

“No, we don’t,” Wade said.

“Spidey, they literally peeled you off the pavement three days ago,” Little Spidey pointed out.

“And I’m _fine,_ ” Tats Spidey huffed, petting the duck.

“You weren’t,” Wade pointed out.

“Psh. The past is the past.”

“How about we ask the real question here,” Peter interrupted magnanimously. “ _Why_ exactly do we have to drop a house on you?”

Because he is a crazy person, Peter. Don’t you see that?

“Because we’ve gotta make one of us a medium, so it might as well be me,” he said.

“You?” Peter and Gwen asked at the same time. Miles felt himself take a mental step back.

“Yeah, me. Listen. This guy we’re hearing, he’s in pain, he’s freaking out, he’s having like, the worst time of his life right now. We don’t know what else he’s got, but he’s got all that, so we’ll use it. If his upset can get across all these dimensions to other Spideys then surely someone else’s can, and that means that it can get back to him. We’ll use the fear as a medium, like a mutual way of communicating, so that we can talk to him and he can talk back to us.”

Like.

Okay.

It almost made sense when he said it like that. But still.

“Why you though?” Miles asked. Tats Spidey rounded on him with a blank face.

“Uh, because? It’s gotta be one of us Spideys and Bitsy sure as hell ain’t doin’ it, so?”

“I could do it,” Bitsy defended. “You just got out of the hospital. From a car. What makes you think you can take a house?”

Miles needed these people to understand that they were arguing over someone getting crushed by a building. He really, really, needed them to understand this.

“Well, all you’re afraid of is responsibility and disappointing people, bud, that’s not a fear we can work with practically here,” Tats Spidey told him.

Bitsy practically hissed and Miles instinctively wanted to join him. Good to know that all Mileses were fully programmed with crippling terror in the face of potential parental disappointment and social responsibility.

“But you’ve got practical fears,” Bitsy said sarcastically. Tats Spidey blinked at him, still absently petting the duck.

“Well, yeah. We all know I’ve got anxiety out the ears, and that’s not even getting started on the trauma. I got plenty of trauma, don’t I, Wade?”

Wade confiscated the duck.

“This is called ‘self harm,’ Peter,” he said seriously. “We aren’t doing that anymore, remember?”

“No.”

“Kid, sometimes I just wanna drown you, you know that?”

“Do it.”

Oh, okay. Everything made sense now. This guy was suicidal.

“I’m not suicidal. I’m just saying. I have a lot of untapped panic and a case of super mega claustrophobia, so I’m like your guy for self-induced panic.”

“And I’m saying that we’ve talked about this every week for the last year, Pete, so you’re not doing this,” Wade said. Tats Spidey pouted at him.

“Well then, what’s your solution, Mr. Answer Man?” he demanded.

Wade’s mask shifted as he raised an eyebrow under it.

 

 

“I AM DISTRESSED. I AM DISTRESSED.”

“He’s fine,” Wade promised them all.

They heard a loud, happy bubble of laughter.

“Red, won’t hurt him too bad,” Wade promised.

‘Red’ was Mr. Murdock and Mr. Murdock happened to be in New York for a trial involving Wilson Fisk, which he had allegedly been waiting ages for. He didn’t live in the city anymore in this verse, so he’d come all the way across country for this, even though he wasn’t even defending anyone at this trial; he was just going to sit in the audience and, according to the Mr. Nelson in this verse, ‘rattle in triumph’ at the sentencing.

This Mr. Nelson was just as entertaining as the one back home, but honestly, he kind of scared Miles when he first saw him. He looked really thin, and like, no Mr. Nelsons anywhere, as far as Miles was now concerned, were allowed to be anything other than healthily pudgy and soft. He also wore a beanie like he was cold, and while he was originally pretty tripped out to see double Mileses and another Peter, he’d gotten over it fast.

He seemed, if anything, almost disinterested in the whole affair now.

“Matty be nice,” he said without heat and without looking up from his phone next to Wade.

They were at an ages-old gym out in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen. It was a boxing kind of place and it was insanely early. Wade had proven himself not only to be a duck-whisperer, but a Spidey tamer. When he decided that they were all gonna take a nap at his place until morning, they all took a nap.

No questions asked.  

There were no other options.

As such, it was now what Tats Spidey grumpily referred to as ‘ass o’clock’ in the morning, and they’d all been joined by a guy wearing gym shorts with athletic tights under them in the gym’s hallway. He had with him a gym bag full of clothes that he and Mr. Murdock had forced Tats Spidey to put on before his torture began.

Everyone called this guy Dave even though the back of his staff shirt very clearly read ‘Ansel.’ Miles asked Bitsy why they called him Dave and he just shrugged and said that that had been decided before his time. Anyways, he explained, Dave wasn’t the team trainer or anything like that, he was the other Daredevil.

Dave was a much friendlier Daredevil.

“WADE I’M SORRY.”

Tats Spidey was maybe having the worst day of his life. But Wade said that this was better than any type of house-dropping.

“Think of it like a controlled environment,” he said.

Mr. Nelson finally brought his head up and then stared up at Wade with soulless eyes.

“It’s cute you think he’s controllable,” he said.

Wade looked back at him.

“He is when I sit on him,” he said.

“No, man. He’s just _mad_ ,” Mr. Nelson corrected.

Miles very much liked this Mr. Nelson. But not half as much as Gwen did. Gwen liked this Mr. Nelson enough to keep putting herself in front of him any time Mr. Murdock with his stunning shock of red hair and even more stunningly defined abs came anywhere near him.

Mr. Murdock didn’t seem to notice Gwen, which made sense. He was blind like the one back home and couldn’t see her furious expression and so could not fully appreciate the intensity of the vibes she was putting out around Mr. Nelson. Mr. Nelson was confused.

“Gwen? That’s my husband,” he told her after the second time Mr. Murdock came out to get other equipment from Dave and had to kind of stagger his way around Gwen to get his phone from Mr. Nelson.

Gwen went tight and guilty.

“You’re the DA in my world,” she eventually admitted, “And like, the last thing standing between that guy and control over the city.”

Mr. Nelson blinked at her and then bent double, busting a gut at the idea of Mr. Murdock being a crime lord. He needed to hold onto Wade’s arm to keep himself upright and then started calling Mr. Murdock a precious ninja kingpin when he came back out, to his enormous confusion.

“Come lie to me, my super villain,” he cooed at Mr. Murdock when he re-emerged from the room for the third time since Tats Spidey’s wailing had started up.

He was obviously conflicted here and it was disgustingly adorable. This Mr. Murdock would definitely do damn near anything for Mr. Nelson’s affection, but he also had a fun new toy suffering in the room behind him doing god knew what. He kinda jerked between the two options a bit before making a sad, distressed sound.

This made Mr. Nelson laugh even harder and made Gwen even more embarrassed.

“Fogs—what?” Mr. Murdock pleaded.

Mr. Nelson waved him off, struggling to catch his breath. Mr. Murdock turned his confusion to Wade who briefly summarized the hilarity of it all.

“I could be a kingpin,” Mr. Murdock sniffed, now offended at the general lack of faith in his deviousness.

“Red, you can’t lie to save your life; I hate to break it to you, bud, but that is step one to becoming a crime lord,” Wade pointed out.

Mr. Murdock lifted his chin up in defiance.

“I’ll practice,” he said.

 

 

“WADE, I’M IN DISTRESS. WHAT DID YOU DO?”

“Again.”

“Nooooooo.”

“Again.”

“Nooooo. No more.”

A thud. Followed by another. Then a scuffle and a shout of pain.

“Get up.”

“Someone just drop a fucking house on me, this is hell. This is hell.”

“Get up.”

“WADE.”

 

 

“I’m not sure this is working,” Peter said delicately after the second hour of poor Tats Spidey getting his ass handed to him in the ring.

Wade hummed.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said.

Mr. Nelson sniffed.

“Just call Michelle,” he said. “She scares the shit out of him.”

A thoughtful pause.

“Nah, he’ll like that.”

“Mm.”

 

 

“We’re graduating, Pete. Helmet.”

“WADE, THIS MAN IS GOING TO KILL ME.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Wade said as he demolished Mr. Nelson in a matching game on their phones.

 

 

Miles had some serious, _serious_ concerns about these people because when the fighting started up in earnest in there, no one did anything.

“He’s sturdy,” Little Spidey informed him.

She was terrifying.            

 

 

Miles was horrified, straight up, 100%, bonafide, horrified. Mr. Murdock finally let them in the room and he was a nightmare. And not the oh-how-embarrassing kind.

No.

Mr. Murdock fought like Tats Spidey was his actual enemy. His worst enemy. Like he was his last enemy on earth and Mr. Murdock was going to make it fucking count this last time. Peter had to use super-strength to keep Gwen from leaping onto him and beating the shit out of him.

Tats Spidey, to his credit, had stopped wailing once he’d realized that Wade wasn’t going to help him, and honestly? Wade was probably the only one who _could_ help him at this point. It became very obvious, very quickly who had taught Tats Spidey how to throw down, and it became very obvious, very quickly that he had yet to overtake his teacher.

Mr. Murdock nearly broke through the floorboards with one of his punches.

He had to have broken a knuckle or two.

He did not care.

Tats Spidey did not care either. He was trying to break the guy’s other wrist. Without success unfortunately, because it is very hard to do things when you can’t breathe. And Mr. Murdock was letting him breathe only when he absolutely needed it.

Yeah.

Yeah, that was terror inducing.

“You can do better than that, kid,” Mr. Murdock sang when Tats Spidey started convulsing, trying to loosen his grip on his neck.

“C’mon kiddo, do better. BETTER.”

Christ.

Bitsy Miles didn’t seem to want to watch either.

“BETTER, PETER. COME ON.”

Tats Spidey almost passed out, but Mr. Murdock jerked him and released his neck so that he could gasp a few times and cough.

“You’re out of shape, kid,” he said disappointedly when Tats Spidey caught his breath.

“F-fuck you.”

“That’s more like it. Saved your favorite for last, Pete. Everyone’s gonna line up.”

Wait.

What?

They were part of this?

“Y’all deaf? Line up.”

Yes sir, Mr. Murdock, you monster, sir.

Everyone formed three very, very anxious lines across the width of the room.

“Lights out,” Mr. Murdock said.

“Fuck you,” Tats Spidey spat.

And Miles realized then exactly what was about to happen. Following that realization with another one: this wasn’t about Tats Spidey being scared anymore.

Mr. Murdock was going to turn each and every one of them into a medium, so help him God.

 

 

Lights out.

 

 

There was nothing more terrifying in the world than standing in a pitch black room with the windows covered over, with nothing but the knowledge that an absolute maniac was going to try to beat the shit out of your new friend in the space around you for comfort.  

Ahahahahaha

He wanted to go home.

“I didn’t sign up for this,” his own voice gritted out somewhere behind him.

I feel you, Bitsy. I feel you.

Wade laughed.

He was horrible, too. All these people were the fucking worst.

He heard the sound of someone standing up behind him. The Spidey Sense went wild. He heard Peter hiss softly, ‘fuck;’ he started apologizing if he hit anyone in advance.

“What’s the matter, kiddo?” they heard Mr. Murdock goading. “Can’t see in the dark?”

The crack of a fist being blocked broke just a few feet behind Miles and it was followed by another one and then one of Peter’s frantic apologies.

“Hey, you’re not bad,” Mr. Murdock said with far too much interest.

“No, no. Actually, I’m terrible,” Peter stammered.

“You wanna play too?”

“I’d rather eat shit, if I’m honest.”

Mr. Murdock laughed again and Miles felt him move past his right hand side. He shivered. The near negligible steps next to him stopped. The Spidey Sense pulsed over and over and over in the back of his neck.

“Go on, ask,” Mr. Murdock said. That wasn’t him next to Miles. Oh god, that wasn’t him, that was Tats Spidey, waiting. Crouching.

“Where are you?” Tats Spidey asked the room.

 

 

He choked out of nowhere and went down hard and the heat and the sound and the struggle was right next to Miles. The sound of fist meeting flesh once, twice. A scramble and gasp and grunt of effort. Then nothing.

 

 

“The _fuck_ are you?” Tats Spidey spat, furious and scrambling back up.

His Spidey Sense was so strong in the dark, Christ. It was making everything worse, it was setting off Miles’s and Peter’s and no doubt Bitsy’s and they were rippling out and tripping each others’ all over as they did so.

“I dunno,” Mr. Murdock’s voice came from farther away this time. “Ask again.”

“Where are you?”

Tats Spidey was just mad now and his fury made his voice drop and made his footsteps quieter and Mr. Murdock’s taunting just made him _better_. Miles didn’t even hear the creak of the wood before a hand blocked another right next to his ear.

He thought he’d had a heart attack for a second.

But then he realized that the blackness was different.

He looked down and saw nothing. Looked up and saw nothing.

He remembered this space from his dream.

He took a step and watched behind him as the colors sparked. He looked up and saw another burst of color some ways away.

“Hello?” he called.

“Hello?” someone answered him.

“Hello?” he called again, moving forward. He jolted. His feet got stuck, but after the initial jolt passed he could move again.

“Is—Is someone there?” the familiar voice, the screaming voice, called again.

Another jolt.

Wait. Those were the strikes. That was Mr. Murdock and Peter fighting around him, scaring the shit out of him. _He_ was the medium now. He started running, before the fear in the real world wore off.

“Where are you?” he shouted. And slipped. The colors crashed out all around him.

“Right here, where are you?” the other voice yelped.

There.

Miles could just barely make it out. A little spark of gold and green in the distance. He forced himself up and started running again.

Then jolted. Froze.

Someone was shouting in pain; he couldn’t tell if it was this world or the one outside.

“H-Hello? Are you still there?” the voice called.

The pain outside didn’t matter. That was a future-Miles problem. Present-Miles had to find this voice.

He ran. Until the gold and green sparks started to look like the ripples bounding out from his own steps. The ones ahead were orange now, orange, gold, and green. Then blue, orange, gold, and green, then pink, orange, gold, and—

“Hello? Please, god—hello?”

He knew that voice. He’d know that voice from anywhere. Anytime. He’d know that voice for the rest of his life even though he’d only heard it for five minutes in total.

“PETER,” he screamed.

The sparks froze over there. Miles didn’t need the fear anymore. He had a face. He had a name. He shared a universe with this man—this was his Spiderman.

“Peter! Peter, where are you?” he cried. Scrambling forward.

There was a long pause and his heart sank and when he came to a stop, he felt lost. Couldn’t tell the direction anymore. Up and down were gone, there were no responding sparks to keep him grounded.

“Peter Parker!” he shouted. “Spiderman, where are you? I can help you! Where are you?”

“You’re like me—you’re the one like me!”

Miles couldn’t breathe. The darkness was suffocating.

“Yes,” he croaked. “Where are you?”

The voice was gone again. Peter Parker, _the_ Peter Parker was gone. Again.

“Mr. Parker,” he shouted. “My name is Miles, you’re my Spiderman. We shared a universe. You died. But I want to help you, you have to tell me where you are.”

“I died?”

Where had that come from? It wasn’t in front of him anymore. Miles couldn’t see any sparks besides the ones he was making.

“You died,” he confirmed. “Wilson Fisk killed you. But I can still hear you—we all can still hear you. Why? Where are you?”

“No,” Peter Parker said softly, wherever he was, he was purposefully standing still now, so Miles couldn’t see the sparks he made, so he couldn’t see him. Then louder, he said “No, no, no, _no._ You can’t—no. Go back. Whoever you are, it’s a trap. I—I think I remember now. Go back.”

Go? Back?

“I’m not going back,” Miles said.  “You were—you _are_ my Spiderman—”

“No, Miles. _You’re_ Spiderman now. I—I can’t—you need to go back. Please, Miles, it’s a trap. I remember now. You all need to ignore me. Just ignore me. I’m sorry, I’ll stay quiet. I can’t live here, I’ve got to die eventually again soon. Just ignore me until then, I’m just a ghost.”

A ghost?

Did ghosts scream in pain?

Did ghosts try to save others?

Did ghosts sacrifice themselves?

Miles thought not, and he wasn’t scared anymore.

“I’m going to save you,” he said. The darkness was falling away. “I think I know where you are.”

“Go—”

 

 

He opened his eyes and, without thinking, threw out his arm. He didn’t know how he’d expected the blow, but he caught the full of it on his outer forearm and it was strong. And it hurt.

But he wasn’t scared.

“I got him,” he said.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ROLL CALL.  
> aka slight name changes
> 
> Peter = ITSV Peter Parker (Miles verse)  
> Peter B. = ITSV Peter B. Parker  
> Tats Spidey = Inimitable Peter


	4. give a penny

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It’s like a damn circus act in this place,” Peter B. mumbled.   
> “If he gives you a sword, do not take it,” Gwen told Miles over her shoulder.   
> “A sword?” he repeated.   
> Mr. Murdock came jogging back after about ten minutes or so, not with a sword, or a staff or any other ninja-like weapon Gwen had started describing in terrifying detail, but with a dog.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If y'all don't know who Tuesday is, in short, she is Matt's retired guide dog from 'a day that ends in y' (standalone piece) and 'Onwards' (in this series). 
> 
> You don't need to read those to get this chapter, though. Just know that Matt brought her and her sister Hazel with him back east to witness the fruits of their daddy's hard work at Fisk's trial.

Miles had to go, but Mr. Murdock was cursing.

Swearing.

Damning to hell God and every saint and angel he could imagine in his present state, some of whom, Miles hadn’t even heard of. He’d be lying if he said a bit of his momentum wasn’t kind of lost in the commotion of Wade chasing the guy around the now-lit room, trying to get him to hold his arm still long enough for him to inspect the damage Miles had done to it. Each time Mr. Murdock managed to collect himself enough to allow this was followed swiftly by him tearing the arm away and doing another lap of the place to work through the pain.

Miles felt so bad.

Awful.

He hadn’t meant to do it, really he hadn’t.

“It’s okay,” Little Spidey told him like she actually meant it this time, “He’s sturdy, too.”

Sturdy enough to withstand super-strength?

“It _just_ fucking healed—I _just_ fucking—”

“I know, buddy, gimme. Two seconds, no more than that.”

“MY WEDDING, WADE. Thirty years for this and Imma have a fucking _splint_ for my goddamn wedding.”

“No worries, we’ll tape some carnations to it and you’ll be good as gold. Gimme.”

“ _Carnations,_ Wade Wilson? Carnations??? At my wedding?”

“I mean, you want lilacs instead?”

“Yes?? Always? Is this a real fucking question you’re asking me?”

Tats Spidey sighed with his fingers pressed against his temple. If nothing else, he seemed mostly recovered from his ordeal over the last few hours. Some of his more minor scratches were fading right before their eyes.

“Is it broken?” he asked the squabbling two behind him.

“Yes,” Mr. Murdock snapped.

“No,” Wade said, now handling the arm in question gently. Miles felt like shit. Like the floor could open up at any moment and swallow him whole and he’d be grateful. The arm sure as hell didn’t look okay. Mr. Murdock was pretty beefy, but his forearm certainly hadn’t been that swollen before the lights had gone out.

Wade rolled his face in exasperation and wrapped a huge hand around the back of Mr. Murdock’s neck. He shook him firmly, such that even Peter B. and Gwen both cringed a little in sympathy.

“ _Listen_ , button,” he instructed. “Listen.”

And Mr. Murdock, surprisingly, shut up and did exactly that. He blinked at Wade for a beat, then down at his arm for another and slowly tilted his head to the side. None of the other team’s Spideys said anything; Tats Spidey had lowered his hands to watch intently.

“Broken?” Wade asked after a long five seconds had passed.

Mr. Murdock dropped his arm and cleared his throat. Everyone else started jeering immediately.

“You fuckin’ drama queen.”

“Matt, _really?_ ”

“All that for a bruise, man? Come _on._ ”

 

 

While Wade taped an icepack to Mr. Murdock’s arm, Miles told the others that he had to go; he had a hunch that he needed to go investigate. The others were iffy on this. They, Tats Spidey and Peter B. especially, weren’t gung-ho about letting him go crashing into this shit alone.

“I’ll be fine,” he promised them. “I’m just going to go check in on where I last saw him, like in real life. Maybe when I’m there we can talk some more and I can get a better idea of what’s happening to him.”

Gwen decided she didn’t like this plan either.

“That’s dangerous,” she said, “What if it really is a trap, Miles? This could be playing right into whoever’s set it’s hands.”

Yes, but there was no way of knowing that unless they tried.

“I like this one,” Mr. Murdock announced from the bench in front of the gym’s upstairs lockers. Miles was kinda flattered.

“It’ll be fine,” he promised, “If anything happens, I’ll call one of you guys right away.”

“Call us,” Tats Spidey said, “We got more people, or we’ll just loan you Wade for half an hour.”

Wade remembered he was part of this discussion and stopped agitating Mr. Murdock to give Miles a cheerful thumbs-up.

“I gotchu, boo,” he said.

Aw. That was kind of sweet, too.

“Message me,” Gwen said.

“And me,” Peter B. agreed. “We’ll keep an eye out for it and the second we hear from you, we’ll head your way.”

Cool, that was doable. Game plan, set.

 

 

“WAIT.”

Peter and Gwen leapt in front of Miles before he could even turn the whole way around. They’d started back towards the little park they’d originally climbed into the verse from but hadn’t even gotten thirty yards back that way before the call rang out. Miles was surprised at the shout, but then even more surprised to see it was Mr. Murdock jogging out to catch up with them with his cane not even touching the ground.

“Don’t go; hold on,” Mr. Murdock barked. “Stay right there. Don’t move.”

Yeah, man. No problem. They weren’t going anywhere now, not with a crazy blind man shouting and flailing at them in public. Mr. Murdock, once satisfied that they weren’t going anywhere, lurched back the opposite direction and took off down the street, double time.

“It’s like a damn circus act in this place,” Peter B. mumbled.

“If he gives you a sword, do not take it,” Gwen told Miles over her shoulder.

“A sword?” he repeated.

Mr. Murdock came jogging back after about ten minutes or so, not with a sword, or a staff or any other ninja-like weapon Gwen had started describing in terrifying detail, but with a dog.

A dog.

He got up to them and groped out for Miles’s had for a second and Miles was too numb with surprise to remember he wasn’t supposed to be taking anything from him. Mr. Murdock dropped the loop of the leash into his palm.

The dog panted happily and leaned up against Mr. Murdock’s leg, even while Miles held this new gift in his hand.

“This is Tuesday,” Mr. Murdock introduced. “She’s my retired guide, but that’s not all she can do. You’re looking for a body; she can help you find it, she used to find me all the time. If you get something of your guy’s, let her smell it and she can help you track him if he’s been moved.”

That was _extremely_ thoughtful, and Peter B. was visibly trying to restrain himself from cooing at this animal, which was a whole new kind of entertaining Miles couldn’t fully appreciate right now.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

Tues looked from him to Mr. Murdock and slowly wagged her tail; it looked like the ostrich feathers old Victorian ladies used to wear in their hats.

“Positive. Trust me on this one. All her stuff is in here, I don’t need her for the next day or so, so that should give you plenty of time to go hunting,” Mr. Murdock said.

He held his hand out for Miles’s again and placed in it a pink bag with white polka dots and strawberries on it with the word ‘Tuesday’ written in loopy gold cursive across the front of it. Gwen made a choked off noise in her throat.

Peter B. gave in just an eensy bit to give Tuesday a little pet and she stepped delicately over to his side to lean against his legs and make sad eyes for more.

He  swore.

“He really doesn’t need a dog,” he said without stopping his petting, “We’ve got the Spidey Sense, he can just use that.”

Mr. Murdock squinted at his left ear, then returned his gaze back to Miles.

“Take the dog,” he said. “You got a hunch, right? Well, this is my hunch. I think you’ll need her.”

“I live in a dorm,” Miles told him.

Mr. Murdock huffed at him and remedied this by taking back the leash loop only to deposit squarely and securely in Gwen’s horrified hand. He closed her fingers and gave the top of them a firm pat. She was too shell-shocked to flinch away from his touch.

“Then Friend Gwen will watch her for the time being,” he informed her.

“I can’t—I— _what?_ ” Gwen stammered as she stared between him and the dog. Tuesday stopped gazing into Peter’s soul to start gazing into hers.

She wagged her tail.

“She’s very well trained. She’ll find your Peter,” Mr. Murdock promised while Gwen communed with the animal’s spirit. Tues made a soft, cut-off whine and got up to nibble at Gwen’s empty hand.

“Oh my god, I’ve got a dog,” Gwen whispered.

 

 

So now they had a dog. And now Gwen and Peter B. were scheming to try to keep the dog forever. And now Miles was wondering if this was maybe some kind of inter-dimensional Spidey kryptonite.

But more importantly, now that they had the dog, they had to figure out what to do with the dog and the dog was more than happy to lay on their feet in Miles’s dorm room while they had this discussion. Ganke walked in on them and only screamed a little bit, to his credit, but then told Miles that in no way, shape, or form were they keeping the dog in the dorm.

After briefly introducing (or maybe re-introducing?) Ganke to Peter B. and Gwen and promising him that Tues was going to be staying with Gwen for the night (although according to Gwen, Tuesday was going to be staying with Gwen for forever), they decided that Miles would send Gwen a message the following evening before he went out on the prowl to pick up Tuesday. Gwen had something to do that night and couldn’t watch Tuesday anyways, so this was fine with her. Peter B. said that he’d be at work when Miles was going out, but to keep him informed if anything happened.

Great.

Perfect.

Team, break. For real this time.

 

 

Miles had to practically pry Tuesday out of Gwen’s loving grip a few hours later. Evidently, they’d had a spa session. Tuesday now had a little burst of silk flowers wrapped around her pink collar and Gwen had no less than 200 selfies she needed Miles to look through with her.

Eventually, the dog was re-acquired and eventually, Miles found himself back out on the streets of his own Brooklyn, suited up, with an impeccably groomed, pale retriever at his side. People were taking pictures. There was nothing he could do to stop that.

He had to get up into the city proper but that was made difficult by his flowery kanine companion. Miles  had the feeling she would not like web-swinging. Miles also had the distinct feeling that any attempt to take that wild and friendly ride would result in an ass-beating from Alternate Universe Mr. Murdock, which meant one thing and one thing only.

 

 

People were taking _so many pictures_. Christ. Ain’t no one ever seen Spiderman with a dog before? Damn. It wasn’t even that big of a deal, okay? People took dogs on the train all the time.

 

 

“Okay, Tues,” Miles told her once they were back to street level and standing in an alley in Midtown. “We gotta find Peter. Uh. So, find Peter.”

Tuesday swung her plumed tail back and forth and stared soulfully into his mask.

Okay, so that hadn’t worked. How do you command a dog?

He googled it.

“Tuesday,” he tried again, brimming with confidence post-google search, “Seek.”

Nothing.

“Search.”

Wagging.

“Go on, girl. Go find him. Go get him!”

Tuesday did a precious little excited dance for him, but went exactly nowhere.

This wasn’t working.

“Tues—” he started. And then choked because she was off.

 

 

Tuesday led him, with his arm barely in the socket, right through Midtown, then took an abrupt turn northwest, which Miles was damn sure was the opposite direction of where he’d last seen Peter. But what the fuck did he know? Mr. Murdock seemed confident about the dog, maybe she was secretly psychic, maybe that was her superpower and Mr. Murdock just didn’t want to say it out loud.

Tuesday took another abrupt left, then dragged Miles down two dead end alleys and back before finally stopping outside an old condominium to stare up mournfully at the sky.

She made her little whining noise and Miles tried to see what she was looking at.

Nothing.

He looked back at her.

This dog was defective. How do you tell someone their dog’s broken?

Tues whined again and backed up a little and started wagging her plume harder than usual. She started making a weird, almost caterwauling sound.

“Hey, girl. What’s the matter? It’s okay, it’s not your fault,” Miles assured her.

She started struggling, pulling hard against the leash and Miles tried to shush her before she could draw attention from the folks milling about outside the mouth of the alley. But she refused. Flat out, hands down refused. She pulled and wriggled and jerked until Miles was worried he was going to choke her if he pulled on the leash any harder.

He didn’t have to worry though. Tues slipped right out of her collar and took off in a sprint down the alley and around the corner.

Holy.

Shit.

He could not lose this fucking dog. He would die.

He took off after her.

 

 

He lost sight of her only two more times before she came to a stop in front of a dumpster and started trying to dig at something underneath it. Miles managed to come up behind her and wrangle her still long enough to get the collar back on her, but then she went straight back to her scrabbling afterwards.

Google informed him that this was normal ‘finding’ behavior. He was surprised and looked between the dog and his phone a few times before getting down flat on his belly to see what she was trying to get at. It seemed like it was something for sure under the dumpster, because she kept twisting her head to stick her nose down there, but she couldn’t seem to figure out how to get the rest of the way under.

He scanned the space, but all that he could see was more trash—

Wait.

He had to kind of shove Tues aside to stick his arm under. There was something—he could feel it; seemed kind of hard and metal and—

He pulled it out.

It was a folded up cane.

Tues was _so_ happy. She proudly pulled the cane out of his hand and then trotted off out of the alley, dragging her pretty pink leash after her, and leaving him sitting stupid and alone by the dumpster.

He then realized like a fucking idiot that he’d forgotten to complete Step 1, which was to give her something of Peter’s to smell.

 

 

Tues was on the hunt for Mr. Murdock, and Miles only had himself to blame for this turn of events. She was well determined, too. Girl would not be distracted. Not by treats, not by balls, not by pleading. No. She was going to find this man, so help her God.

Miles followed the dog in resignation, figuring that it would be cruel at this point to try to give her a new task without a sense of closure. They went a few blocks at a more or less even pace, with Tues proudly carrying her owner’s double’s discarded cane high, when, just like before, she took off like a shot.

Miles decided that what he really needed here was more legs. He deserved the option of more legs. They seemed directly related to velocity and he was a human spider, goddamnit.

This time, he located Tuesday via a crash and a bevy of sudden swearing in a whole new alley, one a little wider than the earlier ones, although twice as wet. She’d started barking and, would you look at that, she _could_ be loud if she wanted to.

Miles had gotten halfway through the lie he was going to tell his poor, unfortunate Mr. Murdock, when he rounded the corner and found, half-clambered on top of a dumpster lid and alternating between swearing and shushing, Daredevil.

Daredevil, Daredevil. Red suit, red horns, billy clubs. Like, _that_ Daredevil.

Right. So he should have expected that with everything else going on with his life these days.

“Is this your fucking dog?” Daredevil squawked at him, before remembering that oh, shit, right, he had to disguise his voice.

Doubly confirmed.

Lawyer Murdock was definitely freaked-out Daredevil Murdock.

“No,” Miles said flatly.

Tuesday jumped up with her paws against the dumpster and Daredevil scrambled up higher and hissed at her.

Huh.

Interesting.

“Bad dog,” Daredevil snapped at Tues. She barked. He flinched and covered his ears, then repeated himself even louder.

“Tues, down,” Miles ordered. She didn’t hear him through her business and he had to repeat the command a few times before she even paused long enough to look at him. Daredevil grumbled to himself and ducked out from the bottom of the fire-escape he was trying to become one with; he crouched down on the dumpster lid in the start of a jump, and as soon as he’d coiled himself down, Tuesday exploded with such single-minded dedication that he startled back and flattened himself against the wall behind the dumpster again.

“Man, do something about your fucking dog,” he half-pleaded at Miles.

“She’s not my dog,” Miles reiterated.

“Then who’s dog is she?” Daredevil demanded, falling out of his gravel again.

“Some guy’s,” Miles said.

“What guy’s?” Daredevil shot back. Miles watched him. He could have fucked off any moment, but instead he was over here, fumbling through small talk and hiding under a fire escape, as Tues scratched at the dumpster and whined.

“Are you scared of dogs?” he asked.

“No,” Daredevil snapped at him, automatically.

“Aren’t you supposed to be the man without fear?” Miles pointed out.

“I am,” Daredevil snipped again, just as tightly as before.

Miles raised an eyebrow. He said nothing.

“I’m not scared of her,” Daredevil reminded him.

Tuesday whined and jumped on the dumpster and Daredevil nearly fell of the opposite side to get away from her.

“Right,” Miles said.

“I’m _not._ ”

“Dude, she’s just freaking out because she found your cane. Get off of there and let her smell you and she’ll probably chill out.”

You’d have thought he’d murdered a baby right there in the street.

“Cane? What do you mean cane?” Mr. Murdock, professional lawyer, stammered.

God, this was exhausting.

“Can we not do this?” Miles asked with his hands.

“Do what?”

“This. With the lying thing. Just get down here before she wakes up half the neighborhood.”

“I’m not lying,” Daredevil said defensively.

Oh. My. God.

Exhausting.

Was this how Peter B. felt, like, all the time?

“Dude. Seriously. You’re Mr. Murdock. Matt Murdock. Blind lawyer guy. I’ve got stuff to do, like, _now_ , so can you just pet her or something?” Miles sighed.

Silence.

“Who the hell is Matt Murdock?” Daredevil asked.

Oh _my god._

Tuesday came over to Miles and pulled at his wrist for human assistance. She tugged him forward a few steps towards Mr. Murdock, who scrambled over to the other side of the dumpster once he figured out what was going on.

“You are,” Miles groaned.

“No, I’m not. I’m Daredevil,” Mr. Murdock said like a fucking moron.

“No, you’re Matt Murdock. And I’m Miles—Morales, remember? We met a few months ago.”

“I’ve never heard either of those names in my life. Wow, good on alliteration though, aren’t they?”

He could not. He just could not.

“Come on, Tues. You did a good job, he’s just dumb,” Miles assured the dog. She’d picked up the cane again and had taken it over to the foot of the dumpster where she could stare mournfully up at the shittier, skinnier, and far less competent version of her owner. Miles gave in and walked over to give her Good Job Rubs before prying the cane out of her mouth with assurances that he would give it over. He stood on his toes and slid the cane as far as he could across the dumpster lid; it bumped up against Daredevil’s boot.

Tues, having now witnessed the goods properly delivered, wagged her plume in accomplishment. She came back over to nibble on Miles’s fingers.

“You’re a good girl,” Miles told her. “And you did a great job. But now, we gotta go find Peter.”

He picked up the end of the leash and started out of the alley. They needed to go up to Queens to get something of Peter’s from his aunt, _then_ they needed to catch yet another train and go back down south to where the warehouse Miles had last seen Peter in was.

He checked for the next train.

“Wait, what do you mean, find Peter?” Daredevil asked, now perched on the very edge of the dumpster, cane in hand.

“I’m looking for Peter Parker,” Miles said, tsking at the time table. He didn’t _want_ to wait 20 mins for a damn train. They had places to be.

He heard boots hit the ground and was vaguely surprised when he turned around to see Mr. Murdock and his weird helmet edging his way very, very carefully around Tuesday closer to Miles.

“Did you—you knew Peter?” he asked.

Wait. Hold up.

“ _You_ knew Peter?” Miles asked in response. Mr. Murdock recoiled and tucked his hands, oddly delicately, against his heart, as though the guy’s memory pained him.

That made Miles’s own heart hurt a little bit. His Mr. Murdock was a lot younger than Tats Spidey’s; he seemed like he was only a few years older than Tats Spidey himself, which meant that he and Miles’s Peter would have been around the same age.

Old enough and young enough to have been friends.

“I knew Peter,” Mr. Murdock said softly.

Definitely friends.

“He’s gone, though, what are you doing out here looking for him? You’re the new Spidey, aren’t you?”

Right, he couldn’t see. Peter B. said he used super-senses to get around, so he wouldn’t have been able to tell from the suit.

“Yeah, I am. And I’m not sure he’s as gone as we think he is. I’ve been hearing him in my head; screaming. I talked to him, he said he was being held somewhere as bait for a trap. I want to find him,” he said.

Mr. Murdock dropped his face a little, apparently trying to think this through.

“Peter died,” he repeated. Tuesday seemed to sense his upset, she pulled at her leash and made a little chuffing noise. Miles cautiously let her go and she bustled over to Mr. Murdock who jumped when she brushed against his side.

“She wants you to pet her,” Miles coached. Mr. Murdock tipped his head up at him and warily and slowly lowered hand down to the dog. She shoved her nose in it and he made a noise of disgust.

It was kind of hilarious.

A light flicked on in Miles’s head.

“Hey, you’ve got superpowers, right?” he asked.

Mr. Murdock went rigid.

“No,” he lied.

“Some kind of like, super senses—super smell, super balance, that kind of thing—yeah?”

“What? No, it’s not—I mean, no. I don’t have any of that.”

God, he was back. The exhausting guy. And here Miles had thought they were making progress.

“Can you track people with your nose? Like her—like Tues? You know, like a bloodhound?”

Mr. Murdock pulled his hand away from the dog again. “I’m just a normal person, kid, I don’t know what you want me to tell you.”

They were going around in circles.

“Mr. Murdock,” he started.

“I’m not—”

“ _Mr. Murdock_ ,” he started again. “Seriously. I know who you are. And you know who I am, I know you do. So let’s just get to the chase. I think Peter’s still alive and I think someone’s hurting him and making him suffer a lot. A lot, a lot. He’s your friend, right? If he’s your friend, then help me find him. I know you can, you know his scent, don’t you? You can track him, can’t you?”

Mr. Murdock moved very slowly, thinking. He dropped his hands to his side and Tuesday looked up at him and pressed the back of her head against the left one.

“He’s dead,” Mr. Murdock said quietly.

“He’s not,” Miles told him seriously.

“He’s got to be. I went to his funeral.”

“Do you know his scent?”

“He was in the c-coffin, I remember. He was in it.”

“Mr. Murdock— _Matt_ , do you know his scent?”

Mr. Murdock lifted his head Miles’s direction again and nodded a little.

“I know his scent,” he agreed, “But I would have heard him. I would have—”

“Help me,” Miles said. “Help me find him tonight. If we don’t find him, there’s no harm done, but if we do, we might save his life.”

Mr. Murdock bit his lip and sighed.

“This is crazy,” he told Tuesday. She licked his palm.

He gagged.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> starting a petition to give gwen a dog


	5. black mirrors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It got dark fast. Nearly pitch black. Miles couldn’t see shit.
> 
> “Aw, poor baby,” Matt murmured. Miles had half a mind to trip him but refrained for the sake of the mission.

Mr. Murdock –“ _Matt_ , call me Matt. Mr. Murdock is weird.”—said that Peter’s scent would be mostly gone by then since it had been so long since his passing, but he remembered it pretty well.

Miles kind of wanted to know why he remembered it so well.

Miles was absolutely not asking, though. Nope, not him.

And it wasn’t like he had time to ask anyways. He’d only heard of Daredevil; he’d seen a few clips of the guy on TV and he’d now met a bigger, slightly more put together version of him, but he’d never actually seen Daredevil do his thing, like, all out.

So here’s how he did his thing:

Fast.

Miles could barely keep up. The dog did not want to keep up; she complained by making little whiney-chattery noises when they paused to breathe.

“Leave her,” Matt told him, toes planted securely on a balcony guard rail. “She’s old. She’s got arthritis in her hips.”

Aw, puppy, no.

“I can’t,” he said when they hit ground level again at last.

“Why not?” Matt asked.

“Because you’ll kill me.”

“ _I’ll_ kill you?”

“She’s your dog.”

It was gratifying to make Daredevil choke, if only for a second.

“She’s not my dog,” Matt huffed while Tues rested by a fence. She did not like travel by fire escape, nor did she like travel by rooftop. In fact, Miles was going to go out on a limb here and say that Alternate Universe Matt used her mostly for sidewalk adventures.

“She is,” Miles said. “Alternate Universe you gave her to me to find Peter.”

Matt was not sold on the whole Spiderverse thing. He was of the opinion that Miles needed psychiatric help, but had nothing to say to Miles’s assertion that maybe _he_ needed psychiatric help too.

“There is not a single me in existence who likes dogs,” he grumbled. Then perked up and started doing his head twitching thing. Miles informed him that he looked like a confused bird. Miles got his head shoved by his dad’s lawyer. He informed Matt that that was child abuse and got an ‘oh yeah?’ and an even harder shove for the effort.

His Daredevil, he decided, wasn’t ripe yet. He needed some time before he learned how to play nice with others.

“There,” Matt said, facing east, “Come on, I got something.”

Got what? Miles knew where they were going.

“We can’t just go south, kid. That’s Fisk territory, there’s hella folks there itching for a fight.”

Fisk territory. Like that even mattered, that guy was in prison.

“Yeah, that’s what they want you to think. Come _on_.”

He started off southeast and Miles went to follow him but stumbled back. Tuesday watched him fall on his ass over her paws. She huffed and lowered her head back on top of them. The little hairs on her eyebrows twitched when she glanced over at his grumbling. He got back up.

“Come on, Tues,” he said, “You heard him. We gotta go.”

Tues twitched her eyebrows away from him guiltily.

“ _Tues._ ”

She looked back at him with big sad eyes.

“I know girl, but you can’t stay here.” He gave a little tug of the leash. Tuesday got up, but her back legs shook while she did it and Miles’s heart twisted.

“Mr.—Matt,” he called behind him. He heard the groan of irritation.

“What, now?”

“She’s tired,” he said, turning around to address the guy. Matt made another noise, this time of supreme irritation, and stomped forward to stand over the dog with his hands on his hips.

“This is quitter talk,” he lectured her.

Tues’s tail stopped swaying. She didn’t whimper, though.

“UGH, fine,” Matt griped. He stooped low and picked the dog up in his arms like a toddler, cursing all her smells as he went. He started off back north. “Come on,” he shouted over his shoulder.

Miles blinked after him and once he realized the leash’s loop had slipped out his hand, he jogged after to keep up.

 

 

“Matthew,” Mr. Nelson said calmly.

Matt handed him the entire dog through his living-room window.

“Gift,” he said.

Mr. Nelson stared at the dog in his arms. Tues wriggled licked his face. He recoiled from her.

“ _Matthew_.”

“I’ll come get her again before morning.”

“What—why? Dog? Why dog?”

“You’re the best, Fogs. I’ll see you later.”

“Wait—”

 

 

“It’s not nice to impose on your friends without asking,” Miles said, finally keeping pace with his red-headed asshole.

“I’m too cool to be nice,” Matt said.

“You’re not cool.”

“Sure, I am. I’m Daredevil. He’s cool.”

“No, he’s just rude.”

Matt stopped and Miles bumped into his back. He rounded on Miles and gave him the same annoyed stare he’d given the dog.

“You know, the _other_ Spidey was a lot quieter than you,” he said. “Taller too. Smelled better.”

Mile pouted up at him and then caught himself doing it.

“You smell like Axe,” he told him.

“You smell like—”

“Child abuse. You’re abusing me. I’ll tell my dad you’re Daredevil.”

Matt made a muffled screech behind his teeth and then threw up his hands and whirled around back towards their destination.

“I hate you,” he called over his shoulder.

“I love you, too,” Miles informed him.

 

 

The only upside to this beautiful new friendship was that Matt really did have a nose like a bloodhound. He cut Miles off every time he tried to give directions and somehow still managed to take them right to the warehouse Miles remembered. If he hadn’t decided that he’d never, ever tell Matt that he appreciated anything he did, then he might have been in awe.

But things as they were, he now had a reputation to uphold.

“How do you know his smell so well?” he finally asked as they tried to find a way into the warehouse. It looked empty, but it was hard to tell for sure. Dark doesn’t always mean empty and Miles wasn’t too excited about jumping into another boss fight without backup.

“None of your business,” Matt said. He’d just wanted to punch out a window and he didn’t see why Miles wasn’t letting him do this. He needed a lot of work, this one.

“Did you guys share clothes?” Miles prodded as he traced the arrangement of padlocks artfully stamped across the main entrance.

Matt snorted.

“Sure, clothes,” he said.

Ew. That sounded like.

Ew.

“Y’all are nasty,” he declared. That one made Matt laugh.

“Peter was married,” Miles pointed out.

“Peter wasn’t always married.”

“Still nasty.”

Matt laughed again. Miles started to think that maybe Peter B. and Gwen were right, maybe Daredevil was to be avoided as much as humanly possible. He sighed and looked up at the door. He remembered getting inside, he just didn’t remember how. He was pretty sure there’d been hella wreckage that he’d more or less fallen into.

“Hey, can you still smell him?” he asked behind him.

“Mmhm.”

Ugh. Frustrating. Maybe they would have to go with Matt’s brilliant window-smashing technique after all.

“Oh.”

Oh? He looked over to see Matt tapping a toe against a low plank of wood spanning the bottom of the warehouse foundation. He tapped it once, then twice, then stopped to listen. Then he dropped down to hands and knees and pressed his fingers against it, still listening. He frowned.

“You hear something?” Miles asked.

“Mechanical? Metal? Sounds like someone’s talking somewhere down. Below? Underground? It’s echoey.” He pressed in closer until his helmet knocked against the wood. Miles breathed for a beat. Matt lifted his head and sat back on his heels, puzzled. He turned towards Miles. “You said Peter was suffering, right? He was screaming, right?” Yes. “I can’t hear any screaming.”

Now that he’d mentioned it, Miles hadn’t heard any screaming for a while now either, which either meant that Peter was keeping good on his promise to stay quiet or that something had happened to him to make him quiet. Miles didn’t like those options.

He looked up at the door. Matt turned around and went still, staring out back into the city proper. Miles let him. He took hold of the main lock and squeezed it between his hands as hard as he could. As gently and slowly as possible, he pulled it away from the loop it hung on and was pleased to find that it came away easily. He set the broken pieces on the ground next to the door and started in on the other locks.

“Hey, kid?”

Oh, he didn’t like that tone. He started working faster.

“Miles?”

Nope, nope, nope.

“Can we maybe forget the whole polite entrance thing?”

_Nope, nope, nope._

Gotcha. Last one. He set it beside the others and lunged out to grab Matt’s wrist. He’d gone all stiff, but Miles couldn’t see anything on the horizon yet, which meant that whatever he must have heard was still a ways off. He pulled Matt with him towards the door and they pulled it back slowly so as not to make too much noise and alert the chatterbox down below. Matt laid a hand on his shoulder to make him stop moving when they slipped inside. He listened and then took his hand off Miles’s shoulder in an affirmative that it was okay to close the door behind them.

It got dark fast. Nearly pitch black. Miles couldn’t see shit.

“Aw, poor baby,” Matt murmured. Miles had half a mind to trip him but refrained for the sake of the mission.

“Voices?” he asked Matt instead in a whisper. He felt the hand on his shoulder again. Then it released.

“Voice. Down.”

“Down where?”

“I dunno kid, I ain’t been here before, you tell me.”

Fair.

“Can you smell Peter?” The hand returned and held for a few seconds.

“Follow me,” Matt said. He moved his own hand from Miles’s shoulder and hooked Miles’s fingers into his beltloop.

 

 

Ah, yes. He remembered this rubble. Specifically, he remembered crashing through it like a rogue skier after a couple of drinks.

Matt hated it. He needed to get new boots, his had barely any grip left and he was slipping and sliding all over the place.

“Just take them off,” Miles hissed at him. “You’re loud as hell.”

“Take them off? Do I look immune to tetanus to you?”

If, by that, he meant he had a piss poor attitude which would depress even diseases, then yes. Yes, he did.

Matt slipped on a piece of metal and nearly reenacted Miles’s unpleasant short-term sky dive from a few months ago; Miles managed to catch his wrist at the last second on instinct and helped him climb back up onto the debris which seemed to be all around them. It was dark, and Miles knew that they’d entered from ground level, but it still seemed like they were straddling the rafters over an abyss. He couldn’t see it, but he could remember the cavernous expanse of the space. The floor would drop down low where the multiverse machine lived.  If he remembered right, they’d be creeping around the very edge of the drop soon.

Matt slipped again and Miles had had enough.

“Aren’t you supposed to be a ninja?” he hissed.

“Who the fuck told you that?” Matt demanded.

“One of my imaginary friends. If you’re a ninja, then _ninja already._ ”

“It’s not that easy.”

“So you aren’t one?” Miles jabbed.

He didn’t need to see Matt’s face to feel his offense.

“’Ninja’ isn’t a verb,” he scolded.

Oooh. Weak, man. Miles was going to consider that a win.

Then _he_ slipped and felt like he’d died for half a heartbeat before realizing that he hadn’t slipped at all, Matt had just swept him off his feet and pressed both of them into what felt like a hidey hole in the rubble.

“What--?”

“Sh.”

The door above screeched open. The bluish light of the street brought the place into greater focus than before, so Miles could confirm that Matt had crammed the two of them into a hollow between sheets of metal and concrete. The door screeched closed again and the dark settled in heavy once more. A beam of light flicked on above them with a ‘click.’ The sound of heavy footsteps echoed, moving in the opposite direction from them.

Miles covered his mouth to silence his breathing.

The footsteps found something hard and metal to stomp against. Maybe a ladder or stairs or something. It echoed. Miles felt Matt’s chest twitch with a few sharp intakes of air. He seemed to be moving his head a lot now.

The footsteps got quieter as they got further away and then the screech of another door opening made Miles shiver. It closed. Matt then did something weird with his shoulders that made his whole body move in a wave.

His breathing stuttered.

“Matt?”

“There’s no way.”

“Matt?”

“No fucking way, this is crazy, there’s no way.”

Wait.

“Can you hear Peter?”

“Just for a second, like. Barely a second. Did you hear him too?”

 _No,_ Miles wanted to say, _but I’m keeping you, pal, sorry to disappoint._

“We gotta get down there,” Miles said.

Matt jerked his head around a couple more times.

“On it,” he said. “Stairs or ladder?”

Oh god, there was both?

 

 

Miles hated, hated, hated ladders. Stairs? Fine. Great. Excellent. Ladders? Portals to hell. Hell in long strips.

He’d helped his dad replace some shingles on the top of the roof when he was eight once and he was pretty sure that he remembered crying twenty of the thirty minutes it had taken to do that. Most of those twenty minutes had been conducted in anticipation of the ladder. The latter five or so, he’d saved for the descent.

“Aren’t you a supposed to be a spider?” Matt asked him like a dick after he’d had to stop and cling for a moment to collect himself for the second time.

“I’m a spider like you’re a ninja, jerkface,” Miles gritted out at him.

“I _am_ a ninja,” Matt agitated.

“Yeah, sure. Secret Ninja Butterfingers.”

Matt made a noise that sounded like a cross between a growl and a yelp.

“Alright, wise guy, move. I got this,” he ordered.

Yeah, like hell he was doing that. There wasn’t room for two of them on this rung.

“Yeah there is. Move.”

Lies.

“Miles. Seriously. Move.”

UGH.

He moved.

 

 

They hit the floor of the cavern and Matt grabbed Miles’s wrist and was off like a shot, like his dog actually, scampering across the floor, occasionally halting and cramming himself and Miles against the outer wall of the place, even though Miles couldn’t tell why. The place felt empty again to him, but Matt didn’t seem to be in the mood to be taking any chances.

Not when his buddy was on the line.

Matt sniffed once or twice and changed direction, taking Miles with him in a few zigs and zags, apparently following Peter’s scent until they were standing in front of a door, lit around the edges by something behind it. Miles could hear a voice somewhere behind it. Then, out of nowhere, Matt grabbed him and smacked his own back flat against the space on one side of the door just as it swung open and threw a trapezoid of light onto the ground in front of it. Matt latched a hand over Miles’s face and his chest at Miles’s back seemed to stop moving altogether.

A person wearing heavy boots and overalls stepped out of the doorway and, grumbling into a phone, closed the door behind them. Darkness descended immediately. Matt’s hand didn’t let up on Miles’s face.

The person turned their flashlight on and carried on arguing with the person on the other side of their phone call as they followed its miniature spotlight over to a set of stairs leading up, up, up back to the warehouse floor.

Matt’s hand absolutely did not let up. Not even after the person cursed their knees at the top of the stairs. Not when the warehouse door shrieked open. And not when it shrieked closed either.

They had to have been standing there for nearly five minutes, in silence, when Matt finally released Miles and they both let the tension out of their spines.

“Was that ninja-ing?” Miles asked.

Matt ignored him to scrape his fingers all over the door behind them, feeling for a handle.

“Peter,” he hissed. “Peter!”

They listened.

“Peter!” he tried again. “Come on, I know you’re in there. Peter!”

Still nothing.

As far as Miles was concerned there was only one thing for that.

 

 

“Miles,” Matt whispered frantically, which really made no sense at all, given that Miles had just hammered his fists into the rectangular equivalent of a gong.

“Miles, I have a fantastic idea.”

And Miles didn’t want to hear it. The door had no handle which meant that it probably required a key, a key which they very much did not have along with all that time they didn’t have.

“Why don’t we—and this is super novel so listen close—”

Miles’s fingers could feel the dent that he’d made in the door, but it was still shallow. It wasn’t enough to widen the lines of light peering out from the frame’s edges. He needed a running start.

“— _not_ alert the entire planet that—where are you going? No, no. Miles, _no._ ”

“Cover your ears,” Miles told him from his thirty yard head start.

Matt apparently knew more or less what was good for him and shut up to follow the command. Miles took in a big breath and then let it out slowly. He started sprinting.

 

 

The door dented in like it had been struck by a cannon ball, and at a later date, Miles would reminisce on that with pride, but in the meantime, he cheered and dug his fingers into the now-widened cracks around it. He pulled and pulled and _pulled_.

Matt eventually came back to earth and put his hands on top of Miles’s to try to help him. Matt, bless his heart, didn’t have super strength, but Miles let him think he was helping anyways. It took some yanking and scrambling, but eventually the door gave way and slid off its hinges, sending the two of them crashing down with it.

Miles popped up first.

The entrance was wide open.

 

 

The entrance fed into a narrow room maybe the size of Miles and Ganke’s dorm room. On one side was a collection of equipment and computers with cords and wires that were strung across the ceiling. Miles followed the wires to what looked like some kind of box mounted on a concrete bench tucked against the opposite wall. There was another door at the head of the box, there. His Spidey Sense squirmed in the center of his back, propelling him forward.

He knew before his hands even hit the box who was inside it.

He still wasn’t prepared, though.

Peter’s mask stared straight up through what looked like a pane of glass fitted over the top of the box. He looked like one of his suits back in his aunt’s shed. He didn’t move. His Spidey suit was just as vibrant as Miles remembered it being; the only thing which gave any hint that he was alive was the slow expansion of his chest and a monitor mounted securely right over his middle which tracked his vitals.

Miles started when one of Matt’s fingers tapped lightly on the glass.

“Is he in there?” he asked.

Is he?

What?

“You can’t see him?” Miles asked. “I mean—sense him?”

Matt tapped on the glass lightly again and frowned.

“Is this glass?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“He’s under the glass.”

“Yes?”

Matt’s frown only got deeper.

“He’s cold,” he said.

Cold?

Miles looked into the box. It didn’t seem like a refrigeration unit; Peter’s chest expanded, but his breath didn’t make clouds. His eyes jumped from Peter’s face to movement at his hand.

It was twitching. He hadn’t seen it before. It was twitching subtly, almost shaking more than anything else. And it was then that Miles realized that the box wasn’t glass; it was some kind of mirror. The far side reflected Peter’s other hand, but it didn’t reflect the lights sunken into the box to illuminate Peter’s body.

It reflected blackness.

Emptiness.

The Spidey Sense squirmed at that too.

“What it is?”

He looked up to see Matt looking at him quizzically.

He didn’t know how to explain.

“There’re mirrors inside the box, but they aren’t reflecting him right,” he said.

“They’re reflecting him wrong?”

“No, they’re just—they’re reflecting something that isn’t there.”

Matt was quiet.

“Why’s he cold?” he asked. “He doesn’t smell the same.”

Miles didn’t know. Miles didn’t understand. But what he did understand was that his Peter Parker was laying in a mirror coffin with all these wires wrapped around his tomb, like he was in some kind of—

Oh _shit._

“Matt, we gotta go,” Miles said, pressing his hands against the glass and trying to find a seam, a button, _something_ to get Peter out of there.

Matt joined him without being asked.

“What’s going on?” he asked instead while they searched.

“This is a lab,” Miles said, “Whoever is here is studying him. He might not be alive after all, or if he is, he might be in some kind of coma or—”

The lights went off.

He closed his eyes and sucked in a breath through his teeth. He should have seen this coming.

“Miles?”

Shit.

“What’s going on?”

“Well, there we go,” a voice said sweetly from the front of the portable lab.

God _damnit_.

“I knew at least one of you would come calling. Didn’t expect it to be the newest one, I can admit that.”

Peter was right. It was a trap.

“Now you, I didn’t expect, handsome. Are you a Spiderman, too? What verse do you come from, hmm?”

Oh. She was talking to Matt.

Matt said nothing. Miles pressed his back against Peter’s box. He couldn’t see in the dark, but he’d know Doc Ock’s voice from anywhere now. It haunted him.  

“You’re all so loyal,” Doc Ock said cheerfully. “But I still wasn’t so sure he’d reach you guys. He’s not very loud, you know. It was kind of disappointing, if I’m being honest here.”

Fuck you.

Fuck. You.

“He’s sleeping right now,” Doc Ock continued, sticky sweet through the dark, “But we can wake him up if you want. Is that what you want to do, Spiderman?”

Miles wanted to stuff _her_ in that box, that’s what he wanted to do. He understood now. All Peter did when he woke up was panic. He was stuck inside this box, mirrors all around him. The only thing he could see was blackness and himself.

He was scared.

Lonely.

The last memories he had to hold onto were those of his death.

“Let him go,” he said.

Doc Ock laughed.

“And lose the best specimen of your kind? No, I don’t think so. He’s taught me so much.”

“Let. Him. Go,” Miles repeated.

“What’s your name, honey? Why don’t we make a deal?”

He didn’t know where Matt was. He couldn’t tell if he was still standing next to him, but he sure as hell hoped so because he had the feeling that he was going to need a lawyer here in a second.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“It’s like this,” Doc Ock said like he hadn’t said anything, “You stop playing Spiderman, and I’ll stop playing with your friend. He’ll die again, you’ll hang up the mask, and we all walk away winners.”

It would probably be kinder to Peter to just let him die again, and Miles was sorry. His heart ached with how sorry he was. The roots of his teeth were sour with it.

He couldn’t. That’s not how Spiderman works.

“No deal,” he said.

“Come on, now,” Doc Ock drawled. “Do you really want to leave him like this? Suspended? Do you even know what kind of work it took to get him where he is? It’s pretty amazing, actually let me tell you. All you Spider people are connected, you know. Like a giant web. But it took ages to figure out what was between it all. You’d think universes would be all stacked against each other, like pages in a book, wouldn’t you?”

Heeled shoes stepped into the lab. Their scraping sounded hollow on the floor.

“But they aren’t like that,” Doc Ock continued, “There’s space in between them. Empty space. Think, like, bubbles. Suspended in water. You guys, you can reach through the water into other bubbles, which is incredible. Unprecedented.”

Miles couldn’t move back even though those hollow footsteps kept coming forward. He had to guard Peter. Peter couldn’t guard himself.

“Your friend here, I just put, pop!” She made the sound with her lips. “Right in that in-between space. He’s half in there. He’s half here. And really, it’s been a miracle worker. He’s not dead anymore! Although I’m not sure I’d say living. But don’t you worry, he’s much happier there. He really likes that in-between space; his cells like it almost better than they like it here. If I don’t give him a little time out in there, he starts getting all glitchy.”

Wait, what did that mean? Did that mean that this verse was rejecting him? Did that mean that he couldn’t stay in this verse, even if he wanted to?

Did that mean—did that mean that Peter couldn’t be saved?

“I know what you’re thinking, little one,” Doc Ock said, just a few feet away now. “Spiderman _saves_ people. Well, I’m sorry, but you can’t save him. He’s done. This is as far as I can take him; some kind of multiverse chimera. But you can save you. And you can save the other Spidermen. Spare them from coming out here for nothing, just like you. Or from becoming new toys for me to play with once I’m bored with this one. Or like I said, we can make a deal.”

“No deal.”

That wasn’t him.

He heard Doc Ock’s intake of breath.

“No one asked you,” she said in the direction away from Miles. Miles shivered.

He heard the sound of metal sliding against something hard.

“Maybe not. But two can play at this game,” Matt said smoothly. Miles didn’t hear his footsteps but he did hear a sharp gasp.

“Let’s you and _me_ make a deal,” Matt said, low and dangerous. “Mine’s easier than yours. You give us the body. No one gets hurt.”

“Spiderman doesn’t kill,” Doc Ock spat at him.

Matt laughed, loud and horrible.

“Spiderman—that’s cute. You think I’m Spiderman? You really think I’m Spiderman? Nah, honey. Try again.”

Silence.

“Let go of me.”

“Who am I?”

“I said, let go of me.”

“And I said who. Am. I?”

Miles could hear Doc Ock’s breathing now. She sounded terrified. He felt sick.

“Daredevil,” she whispered.

“That’s right,” Matt drawled, “Now tell me, darlin’, you wanna make a deal with the Devil?”

Silence.

Miles could practically count his breaths.

“Give us the body,” Matt said, “Or I’ll _ruin you._ ”

Doc Ock said nothing. Matt waited a few beats.

“I don’t got all day, sweetheart,” he said, “I got places to be. People to bury. So what do you say? Body for me, body for you? Or body for me, body for me fucking anyways?”

 

The lights turned back on.

 

 

“That’s what I thought,” Matt said sweetly, leaning his lips right up beside Doc Ock’s ear with one of his billy clubs held tenderly up against her chin. It wasn’t the billy club; it was a blade, but the handle was the same. It must have been hidden inside the club. His other arm was locked firmly across her throat.

“Scram,” Matt said into Doc Ock’s neck. “ _Now._ Before I change my fucking mind.”

He released her in one fluid motion and sent her stumbling back towards the door. He turned around and stood, somehow wider than ever, in front of Miles and Peter’s box. She sneered at him.

“I’ll end you too, Daredevil,” she snarled.

Matt jerked her way and she flinched hard. He laughed. Her lips curled as far as they could and she took a step back, then another; then turned around and started running. Miles heard them start up the stairs and only then did he release the breath he was holding.

“She’s calling the cops,” Matt said, spinning around, all traces of Daredevil gone. “You got any imaginary friends who can help us move a body?”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> y'all, I have found a beautiful, mostly friendly, antagonism between ITSV Matt and Miles and I'm keeping it.


	6. pulling bunnies out of hats

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nothing made sense. It was all just numbers and equations and notes in half-Latin. Peter B. and MJ stared at the screen in silent disgust for a full three minutes before they passed the laptop over to Gwen and Miles for a go. MJ then helpfully held the screen over Peter’s slack face and asked him what the fuck this meant, sir.
> 
> “MJ, language,” Peter B. sighed with his face in his hands.

Alright this was fine, Miles could do this. He could do this, he just had to get Peter out of the box.

Actually, no. Was the box important?

Change of plans, he just had to get the box off the wall.

Easier said than done. It was hard to get a grip on the side of the box because it was attached to a concrete slab and, even then, once he did, it didn’t want to come off. Matt helped by pulling hard on the other side.

“Imaginary friends now, please,” he gritted out, really putting his back into it. There was a loud bang from above and he ripped himself away from the box.

“I’ll distract them,” he said, “It’ll give you maybe five or ten more minutes. You have my number, call me when you and him get somewhere safe.”

Miles promised he would and Matt bolted out of the lab. Then Miles reached out to Gwen. She reached right back and yanked open a window already in her suit.

Thank god for Gwen.

She didn’t need to be told to help him move the box (thank god for Gwen, part two), but their combined strength sent a crack skittering through the top layer of glass. Miles swore. Gwen didn’t. She was in superhero mode. She pulled again, more gently, but the crack just widened. She blew out a breath of air, then looked back into Miles’s eyes.

He shrugged.

They shattered the glass.

 

 

Peter was _heavy_ , and not heavy as in ‘heavy-heavy.’ Miles could lift more weight nowadays than he was comfortable with admitting to himself or anyone else. He was heavy, as in, limp and unmoving. Deadweight. And awkward as hell. Neither Gwen nor Miles was tall enough to accommodate all the guy’s legs, and like seriously? Was that much leg strictly necessary? Gwen took the guy’s knees while Miles took his shoulders so they could lift him out of his new nest of broken glass. Then they had to put him down to have enough hands to reach out for Peter B.

He didn’t respond.

Miles was going to have a heart attack.

He pushed harder, and harder.

“Come _on_ , man,” Gwen creaked out through her set jaw. “We don’t got time for this.”

They both crashed forward and Peter B. stood there, in his socks, in his living room, with a lady hiding behind a pillow on the couch behind him.

Peter B. saw them, flicked his eyes to the body behind them, and launched into Spiderman mode. He was tall enough and gangly enough to handle all those legs without much trouble. He dropped Peter on his living room floor, then did something Miles suddenly realized was absolutely genius. He took a video of the lab. He got out his phone and went as calmly and slowly as he could around the box, around the lab station. There was a crash outside the lab which he carefully ignored. Miles couldn’t. He got back up from his knees next to Peter but found himself stuck. A hand in the back of his suit. He turned around halfway to yank away, but found himself looking right into the down-turned eyes of Peter B.’s wife. Her hand wasn’t just holding him fast, Miles saw, it was clenched into a fist.

“ _Peter_ ,” she said.

“Working on it,” Peter B. mumbled.

A shout echoed somewhere outside the lab and Miles’s stomach dropped. That had sounded like a gunshot. What if Matt had gotten hurt?

“Let go, please,” He said, pulling at MJ’s hand. She didn’t even look at him. Another volley of gunshots rang out.

“Let go, _please_ ,” Miles tried, not wanting to wrench her hand off. This was Peter B.’s wife they were talking about.

“Peter,” she said in a louder voice.

“I’m almost done, babe, give me two seconds,” Peter grumbled, half-buried under the little desk in the lab.

Several shouts broke out in echoes followed by manic cackling. Peter B. jerked at that and ripped the computer tower in there out without preamble. Miles had never felt so relieved in his life. That wasn’t Doc Ock cackling.

“That’s my friend,” he told MJ’s grimacing face.

“Friend?” Gwen asked.

“Daredevil.”

Gwen stared at him.

“He sounds happy,” MJ said helpfully. A sound like several old metal trashcan lids being smashed together reverberated through the lab door’s entrance. Peter B. poked his head out for a second, hummed, and came back through to his living room.

“He’s good,” he said. “Making a castle out of riot shields.”

He set the computer tower on the floor by Peter’s limp head, called behind him “They’re in good hands, Double D,” and, at the responding little cheer, closed the window.

 

 

An hour or so in, and Miles and Gwen still didn’t really know what else they were supposed to be doing. They held the cups of tea Peter B.’s wife had forced into their hands in silence, perched on their gray blanket-draped couch while MJ hooked her chin over Peter B.’s shoulder and nitpicked at whatever he was doing on his laptop.

Peter B. had listened to Miles’s tragic tales of woe with his chin tucked into his hands and had decided that they needed to get a better idea of what exactly Doc Ock had been doing to Peter before they tried to wake him up. He’d set himself to breaking into her admin account on the computer to this end, but apparently, hacking was a slow-going process. Nothing like in the movies.

Granted, the movies didn’t spend a whole lot of time covering husband and wife hacking teams either, which was a _shame._

Peter B. kept saying “honey, I love you,” to MJ without looking at her, which Miles and Gwen quickly learned was code for “MJ, you’re driving me _crazy_ , I’m trying to work here.”

MJ was undaunted. She leaned over him and picked at keys until he eventually held his hands up in irritation.

“Mary Jane,” he said while she typed awkwardly over his shoulders. “Spiderman here.”

“Hmm? Oh hi, Spiderman,” she said amicably.

“I’m delegating tasks.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Your job is over there,” he indicated with his hands to Peter’s lifeless body. MJ had extended hospitality towards him by carefully tossing an orange and green afghan over him and stuffing a couch cushion under his neck.

MJ studied him for a moment and gave it a good, hard think.

“I like this better,” she said. She returned to the laptop. Peter B. took in and let out a calming breath.

“Babe, you can’t code.”

“You can’t either; besides, I’ve been watching tutorials on Youtube.”

“What? No, I can code. Who told you I can’t code?”

MJ stared at him with pity in her eyes.

“I can code,” Peter B. maintained, a little more defensively this time.

“Baby, you’re so pretty,” she said. She petted the side of his face affectionately.

“Did Flash tell you that shit? He’s full of shit. I can code. I’ve been coding for like, years.”

“So pretty. I mean, model-esque.”

Gwen choked on her tea. Miles hid his face behind his. They were a great couple. Miles was so happy that they were together again. Peter B.’s MJ was sardonic and sarcastic and seemed to have decided that she would dedicate her life to harassing and haranguing him in whatever way she could while he pretended to be grumpy about it.

It was cute.

The elephant in the room was that Peter B.’s MJ, for some unfathomable reason, did not like Peter. She announced that he was weird and ‘spry-looking’ and she refused to look at him for longer than was strictly necessary. She shielded her vision with pillows and hands and Peter B. when he proved convenient. She called him ‘the blonde one’ and would not deviate from this, even though the poor guy’s mask was still stretched securely over his face.

Gwen pointed out gently that he wasn’t trying to make her uncomfortable, but got only a blank, suspicious stare in return, before MJ decided to silence her and Miles for the time being with tea.

Hence, tea.

“Woah, did that work?” MJ suddenly asked. Miles and Gwen perked up and looked over to Peter B. The corner of his mouth twitched. He said nothing. MJ got a handful of his collar and gave him a shake. “Did it would? Did I hack it? Peter. Peter, am I a hacker?”

Peter B. said nothing,

“I’m a _hacker_. Oh my god. I’m putting it on my—”

The screen went blue. MJ gasped and then turned back to Peter B. in betrayal.

“It didn’t work,” she said, heartbroken.

“But you tried so hard,” he told her sympathetically.

“You knew it wouldn’t work, you asshole.”

“You were doing so well.”

“I’m divorcing you.”

“Mmm, alright. I’ll call Stillwell again.” MJ huffed and shoved off him to flop down on the couch between Miles and Gwen. Miles offered her his tea. She groaned and draped herself all over the cushions instead.

Peter B. went back to work.

 

 

It took another hour or so, during which time Miles and Gwen tried to work out a new plan of action. It was hard since they really didn’t know how to wake Peter up safely or really, what to do with him after that. Gwen thought that if he was an Avenger, then maybe they could hand him over to them for safe-keeping and rehab. Miles didn’t know if he was an official Avenger in his verse, though. He only knew that Peter seemed to have had an alliance with Daredevil.

Peter B. made a pleased sound which got all their attention.

“Are you in?” MJ asked, upside-down on the couch now. She had a lot of hair and Miles had tucked his feet under himself so as not to get involved with any of it.

Peter B. huffed in amusement.

“Yeah, I’m in,” he said.

 

 

Nothing made sense. It was all just numbers and equations and notes in half-Latin. Peter B. and MJ stared at the screen in silent disgust for a full three minutes before they passed the laptop over to Gwen and Miles for a go. MJ then helpfully held the screen over Peter’s slack face and asked him what the _fuck_ this meant, sir.

“MJ, language,” Peter B. sighed with his face in his hands as his wife got over her fear of his double to commandeer one of his hands to stick to the laptop screen so as to gain an answer by osmosis or clairvoyance. It didn’t stick, but the power of MJ’s stare somehow kept it from sliding right off.

“Maybe Tats Spidey can read it?” Gwen offered.

Miles looked at Peter B. hopefully. MJ set the laptop back down.

“Is he a hacker?” she asked.

Peter B. sighed and got up to take the laptop back.

 

 

“Dude, what?” Tats Spidey asked, having joined them all in Peter B.’s living room with a bowl of cereal in one hand. He stuck the spoon in his mouth and tried to scroll through the notes, then swore around the spoon upon realizing that the scroll went the opposite way in this verse.

He didn’t even look at Peter, or MJ for that matter. It was freaking them all out. They tried to kind of gesture at Peter when they talked about him, but Tats Spidey stayed resolutely fixated on the screen.

“This is some crazy shit,” He diagnosed.

Which, like, they all knew that already.

“Can you decipher any of it?” Peter B. asked.

Tats Spidey set his bowl to the side. Miles wouldn’t have pegged him to be a granola kind of guy; honestly, he would have set him squarely between Lucky Charms and Captain Crunch, but Tats Spidey was just full of surprises.

“I don’t do biology,” Tats Spidey informed them around the spoon. He did stop scrolling and stare at the document for a long moment, though. Then he stood up.

They all watched him.

“That’s uh, my PC,” Peter B. called after him. He opened a window to his own verse and made a confirmation sound behind him. Someone cursed him in his own apartment and threatened him with mutilation if he was going out on patrol. He informed them that it was Sunday and Sunday was Spiderman’s day off. He returned with the laptop held aloft and his own laptop slipping out of his grip on it and three other textbooks in the opposite arm. He reclaimed his seat on the floor next to his window and went back to staring.

At least he’d stopped chewing on the spoon.

MJ asked Peter B. why he didn’t have any tattoos.

“What would I even get?” he asked her. She shrugged.

“Something cool?”

“Yeah, okay, I’ll just get ‘Juicy’ printed across my ass.”

Peter B.’s MJ had a bizarre sense of humor.

“Won’t fit,” Tats Spidey informed them without looking up and with far too much confidence. Gwen meandered over next to him and he asked her to look up certain words in the index of one of the books. Miles went over and got assigned to look up a word in another of them.

It was hard to tell if knowledge of these words made any difference to the thoughts rattling through Tats Spidey’s head, but he did seem to be reading through the notes faster now.

MJ watched, intrigued.

“You don’t do biology, but you seem to know a lot of it,” she observed, then Tats Spidey locked his attention on her for the first time. He stared at her like she’d just told him the password for NASA’s front door.

He threw everything around him down and leapt back into his verse and they heard him shrieking, “MJ, YOU’RE A BIOLOGIST.”

“Get fucked, Parker,” a voice informed him.

“You’re a biologist, how did I forget you’re a biologist?”

“Peter, _you’re_ half a biologist, you fuckhead, you’ve got a double major.”

“Holy shit, _I’m_ a biologist.”

What. Miles and Gwen exchanged concerned eyebrows and Peter B.’s MJ looked up at him in concern.

“We can’t all be home runs,” he told her. She looked at the lifeless Peter on her living room floor as though he was the greatest proof of this.

 

 

Tats Spidey’s MJ, whose name was not Mary Jane, but Michelle Jones, had to be physically carried through the window and she did not come willingly. She clung to Tats Spidey and refused to put her feet on the ground, hissing that she had not agreed to fuck up a parallel universe with him. He dropped her on her ass and she punched him hard enough in the shin that he made a noise somewhere between a yelp, a squawk, and a whimper.

“Why do you hate me?” he asked her pitifully. She sneered at him and snatched Peter B.’s computer out of his reach.

Gwen was delighted with Michelle. She thought that they had a lot in common.

Michelle was a lot closer to the kind of expertise they actually needed at the moment. She examined Peter, then the notes, then declared it all some ‘crazy bullshit,’ just like her buddy (friend? Boyfriend? It was hard to tell what she and Tats Spidey were, not to mention if they even liked each other to begin with.). Then she scrolled a little bit and started frowning deep. The frowning didn’t let up. She made Tats Spidey rattle off a few definitions of things that he seemed to have repressed somewhere in his memory and which even he was surprised, although pleased, to find still lurking around in his head.

“I need a sample and a microscope,” Michelle finally announced.

Tats Spidey stared at her for a long moment, slack-jawed, and then came back to life.

“I’ll do you one better,” he said.

 

 

“Peter, _why_.”

“See, Mr. Stark, I know what this looks like.”

“No, no, you shush. I’m talking now. Why does this shit always happen to you? And why, why, _why_ are you so hellbent on dragging me into it?”

“I’m not. I’m just here asking either you or Miss Potts—”

“Stark—”

“ _Potts_ for a favor. A personal one. For personal reasons.”

“Name them.”

Tats Spidey produced his evidence in the form of introducing everyone in his new party. Tony Stark, with more gray in his hair than the one in Miles’s verse, stared at them all. Gwen glitched. It set all of them off to glitching and Stark’s eye twitched behind his glasses.

“Lord Jesus protect this boy and everyone around him from his dumb fucking luck, amen,” he said to the ceiling. Then sighed. “You can use Lab 51— _51_ , Peter. You’re still banned from 50, don’t think I forgot.”

Tats Spidey beamed at him.

“You’re my favorite su—”

“Finish that sentence and I’ll fire you. Get. Go. Out of my sight.”

“But sir, I already am out of your sight.”

Silence.

Even if he was a little grayer, this Tony Stark was much more spry than the one in Miles’s verse. He almost caught Tats Spidey before he made it down the hall and everything.

 

 

Michelle needed to take a sample from Peter which meant that they had to remove his mask and for a second, Miles’s heart stopped in dread that Peter’s face might not be under it. He was struck with the thought that maybe Doc Ock had dressed some rando up as Peter and left him in the box as a decoy. That Peter was still out there, screaming into oblivion, but now somewhere where they couldn’t hear him.

Relief washed over him like briny ocean water when Gwen peeled back Peter’s mask to reveal his placid, pale face and blonde mop.

Tats Spidey recoiled.

“What the _fuck_ is that?” he demanded.

“Wait ‘til you see his eyes,” Peter B. told him.

“What the fuck’s the matter with them?”

“Hey, moron, open your double’s face, I need a cheek swab,” Michelle interrupted. Tats Spidey did it without question.

Michelle was so great. Miles liked Michelle so much.

She took a swab of his cheek and rattled through a bunch of drawers until she found a dish to rub the swab all over. She did some other things to it and stuck it under a microscope and went still and silent for a long few moments.

“Peter,” she said at length, referring to her Tats Spidey.

“Yes, dear?” he answered.

“Is Dr. Banner still here?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Go get him.”

“Roger that.”

And Tats Spidey bounced away, leaving them all standing nervously in this pristine white room with Peter laying on a cot. His face looked much softer without the mask. Miles could see now that he had blonde eyelashes, too. MJ plastered herself against Peter B.’s back to avoid having to look at them. Gwen stepped closer to Michelle, who had started taking notes on a piece of paper she’d torn off a larger one peeking out of a drawer.

“Is it bad?” she asked.

“Not enough info to tell,” Michelle said, “But it sure as hell isn’t good.”

Right. Yes. That was probably the best they could expect.

 

 

Tats Spidey reappeared with Dr. Banner, who looked exactly the same as the one in Miles’s physics textbook. He was much more flustered than anticipated, however, and did three whole headcounts of all the Peters in the room. He grasped for Tats Spidey blindly, then, once he got him, put his hands on his shoulders and stared him dead in the eye.

“I’m going to kill you,” he said kindly.

Tats Spidey smiled nervously.

“Surprise?” he said.

“You little _monster_ ; when did this first start? You should have told me then, Peter. Why are you always doing this? This waiting ‘til the last possible second thing? Is this part of the anxiety?”

“Yes,” Tats Spidey said without blinking.

Dr. Banner stared back at him and then dropped his hands with a sigh.

“Fair enough, alright. Hi Michelle, how are you? What’s Mr. Young and Stupid 2.0 got going on with him today?”

“His cells are weird,” Michelle said without looking up. “They’re glitching, first off. But also they’re—I don’t know how to describe it. Wavering? Kind of glittering? See for yourself.”

She moved so Banner could look into the scope. He did so and then pulled back and blinked at Peter’s sleeping face on the cot.

“What on god’s green earth—hold on. Stay there, all of you.”

 

 

Banner fetched Thor. Thor who had like, crazy hair. It was short. Thor was not supposed to have short hair. Thor in no one else’s verse had short hair. He didn’t even bother with the microscope, either, he just wandered over and smelled Peter, all nice and creepy.

“This one is very ill,” he informed Dr. Banner with sorrow in his voice.

“Yeah, no shit. That’s not what I asked you,” Dr. Banner said irritably.

“He must be returned to equilibrium.”

“Thor, speak in a language that we can understand, please, I’m begging you. Just this once.”

Thor gave Peter a shoulder squeeze and Miles thought he saw the guy take in a slightly bigger breath in response.

“He is stuck in between two states of being,” Thor said, “I have seen this a few times. Fading in and out between planes. Space sickness, you might say. People who get it start to smell of ozone.”

“Does it hurt?” Miles asked him. Thor looked over at him and cocked his head. Then dropped his eyes.

“It can hurt very much, yes,” he said.

“How do you know where the cells want to be?” Banner asked.

Thor hummed.

“You don’t,” he said.

Unhelpful. Peter B. crossed his arms.

“We’re all out of place right now,” he said, “Will taking him back to his verse help stabilize his cells?”

Thor looked at him with interest and then looked down at the top of Tats Spidey’s head next to him. Tats Spidey looked up into his face and he jerked his gaze away just before they made eye contact.

“It might, but if he’s stuck in between planes, then he might like that space better.”

“So we need to get him into the space in between verses?” Gwen asked. “Wasn’t that where he was stuck before?”

Yeah. Surrounded by sparks and screaming. Miles’s fingers felt cold and his eyes felt tired. It was probably somewhere around six or seven in the morning back at home. He was exhausted. But it seemed like there was still so much to do. The back of his head buzzed with white noise.

“Why don’t we do this?” Banner thought out loud, “Let’s do a little bit of sensory deprivation and see how that fairs for him. Maybe he can go into that place on his own and all this moving and shaking is making it hard for him to do that. We’ll give him a day or so in the tank and see if his cells stabilize a bit. If they do, then we can probably wake him up and see where to go from there. If they don’t. Well. We can start thinking about arrangements for that, too.”

You didn’t have to be a genius to know what that meant.

Peter was dying all over again. All that work to get him away from Doc Ock and he was still slipping away. At least he wasn’t screaming in the in-between again. Although now, Miles kind of wished he still was. At least that way they knew he wasn’t dead.

There wasn’t anything else he, or anyone else in their group could do, so they had to leave Peter with Dr. Banner. He promised that he would take care of him and, before they all left, he told them all that it was a stupid thing that they were all trying to do, but a brave one.

“Takes a lot of heart for all of you guys to come together on this,” he said.

A lot of heart.

Yeah. Yeah, that was true. If nothing else, then Miles hoped Peter would wake up once last time so he could show him the news coverage of his funeral, so that he’d slip back under knowing that he’d really made an impact. He couldn’t think of anything more comforting than that.

 

 

Miles went home and it felt like a relief. It didn’t make his heart any less heavy, but there really was something about being back in his verse that made the tension in his spine settle a bit. Things felt less heavy and more solid. Ganke came in and asked him if he was okay.

He said he was.

Then he went to sleep.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> everyone get out, Peter B.'s MJ is my favorite now. She can only be as weird as he is.
> 
> **for those confused about Tats Spidey's edu background, he did a double major in mechanical engineering and biology at CUNY before fucking off to go do his Master's in material engineering from Cornell. He doesn't do much with human bio is the main thing here.


	7. blame the dog

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tats Spidey rejoined them in the elevator with a happy Tues again like nothing had happened and then he cleared them to go up to Lab 51. 
> 
> The bucket was full of propane lighters and several flasks with stoppers in their mouths. Peter B. made Gwen stand next to it and plastered himself against the wall for the entire ride up, which did nothing but freak everyone else in the space out even more.

He woke up to someone stabbing him in the ribs. He blinked himself awake and there was Ganke again, holding out his phone. It was buzzing nonstop from a number without a contact name.

Damnit.

Matt. He’d forgotten to call Matt.

He took the phone and told Ganke he wasn’t going to class. Whatever was going on with his face must have been enough to convince Ganke that this was a wise decision and he said he’d tell their first period teacher he was sick.

He left, and sneakily and kindly left an unopened can of coke on Miles’s desk.

 

 

Matt didn’t answer his phone when Miles tried to call him back, so he snuck out to grab some breakfast and go check in with him. He had to google Nelson & Murdock to find the office again, but when he got there, no one was in. The door was locked and everything.

Dread sunk deep in his stomach.

Matt had been kind of manic, laughing, when he’d left him, but there had been gunshots. He could have gotten hurt.

Oh god, he could have gotten arrested.

He needed to find him.

 

 

It wasn’t hard to. Turned out that people in Hell’s Kitchen were A. gossips and B. very familiar with their local blind guy.

A series of bodega owners and construction workers informed him that they’d seen Matt earlier that day, headed to the park.

“Guy finally broke down and got a guide dog,” one of the bodega owners told Miles fondly. “She’s beautiful. He really should have gotten one sooner; I know he’s got his pride and things, but really, she seems to be helping him so much.”

Tuesday. How could he have forgotten about Tuesday?

 

 

Matt wasn’t at the park, but Mr. Nelson was, surprisingly, with what Miles could only assume to be a friend. She was tall and blonde and she was arguing with him about something when Miles came up and tried to think of a non-awkward way of asking Mr. Nelson were his partner in non-crime was.

“Oh, Miles, how are you?” Mr. Nelson asked upon recognizing him. “Your dad doing okay?”

“He’s great and I uh, just wanted to thank you and Mr. Murdock for all the work you did to help him,” he said.

The blonde lady slowly twisted her head to the side.

“Isn’t it a school day?” she asked.

Fuck fuck fuck

“I’ve got a furlough day,” he lied. “Is Mr. Murdock around? I kind of wanted to thank him personally.”

Mr. Nelson’s eyes screwed up into an irritated squint.

“No, actually, he had a doctor’s appointment today. And I think he was going to go get this dog—guy just showed up with a dog last night, Kare, I swear to god. This isn’t even the first time, last time it was a kitten. He’s _allergic_ , Kare—sorry, Miles. He was taking a dog to the vet to check for a chip.”

Dog. Vet. Okay, Miles could work with that.

He thanked Mr. Nelson and jetted off.

 

 

He crashed into Matt in the middle of the street and became the worst human being on the face of the planet by accidently squishing one of Tuesday’s toes. He could not apologize enough, even though Tues forgave him after only a few kisses and hugs.

Matt gave him a strange expression and then had Miles stick out his elbow so he could hold onto it and guide them both to a little open space by a street fountain a few blocks over. He gave Miles a twenty and told him to go buy him a coffee and to get himself breakfast at the little store across the way. Miles was taken aback to have been so abruptly trusted with the bill and numbly followed the instructions. He got himself a breakfast sandwich and the lady at the counter, upon learning that it was Matt who the coffee was for, doctored it according to his usual requests.

Matt accepted the coffee and wouldn’t hear anything Miles said until he’d gotten a fourth of the way though it, which Miles realized later was a sneaky trick to make him eat something before they got down to business.

Matt was a food ninja too, so it would seem.

“Is he alright?” Matt finally asked. Tuesday laid good and quiet next to his left foot.

“We don’t know yet,” Miles said. “Tats Spidey got his Doctor Banner and Thor to look at him, and they think he’s got some kind of space sickness. They’re keeping him in a sensory deprivation thing to try to make his cells more stable—that’s what they said at least.”

Matt said nothing. He took a few more sips of coffee.

“Well, at least he’s not screaming,” he said.

“What if he dies again, though,” Miles blurted out. His throat suddenly hurt. Ached like it was half its normal size. He wasn’t hungry anymore. His eyes burned. “All that and he’ll just die again and it’ll be all my fault, like, I should have just listened to him and ignored him and let it happen on its own and—”

“Woah, woah, woah. Hey, kid, take it easy. Here, come here.”

Matt moved to kneel in front of him so he could hug him. The hug only made his throat feel worse, and even worse, it made tears start leaking. Matt smelled like coffee and laundry soap and it was just so normal.

“Miles, c’mon buddy, here. Deep breaths. Here, look at me. Breathe with me.”

He tried to clear out his eyes and sniffed hard. Matt took off his glasses and rubbed a thumb into Miles’s shoulder. When Miles could finally see through the tears, he saw the pink scars around Matt’s eyes. Some smooth, some gnarled. They looked like healed burns under Matt’s milky bluish irises. They were kind eyes still overall, somehow. And Miles actually felt a little better for seeing them. He could understand why Matt hid them from people; besides them being a little jarring, he looked younger and much, much friendlier without his glasses or a mask to cover them up.

He sniffed again and felt guilty for having made Matt pull out the big guns to try to comfort him.

“That’s it, kid, that’s it. It’s going to be okay,” Matt told him. “Trust me on this one. Either option for Peter right now is a better option than sitting around in Doc Ock’s lab; getting him out of there was the most respectful thing you could do for him. If he lives, great. Amazing. Beautiful. The world will be a better place for it. But if he dies, kiddo, that’s not your fault. And it’s not my fault. It’s only Fisk’s fault. And if he dies again then we can make sure he gets reburied somewhere where this can’t happen to him again, okay? There isn’t a bad way for this to go, Miles. There are so many people trying to help him and we’re all doing our best. There is nothing else anyone can ask of us and I promise you that Peter understands and appreciates this, every bit of it.”

His eyes burned again and he swallowed hard. Matt’s eyebrows bent at his lack of response and he sighed and pulled back. He stood back up and sat down next to Miles on the fountain's concrete. He fitted the glasses back on his face.

“Miles, you aren’t going to be the same kind of Spiderman Peter was. Hell, even Peter couldn’t be the kind of Spiderman he thought he needed to be. Give yourself a break. You’re one person. There’s only so much you can physically do.”

He was right, on all counts, but still. That compulsion to be more. To be better. It was still there and it was so heavy; it sat right over Miles’s stomach. He didn’t have anything to say. Saying more would just make him seem ungrateful when Matt was trying so hard to make him feel less like shit.

“Honey, you’re not even fifteen.”

See, when he said it like that, it made Miles want to cry for _years_.

Matt sighed again. Then bumped his coffee up against Miles’s knuckles. He was confused. He thought he wanted him to hold it and so took it with one hand while mopping his face up with his other.

“Drink some.”

What? Why?

“Just do it.”

He was skeptical. He tried a sip.

It was foul. He gagged.

Matt laughed and the sound made something in Miles’s chest loosen a bit.

“Why do you even drink that stuff?” he asked, warbling a little.

“You’re not off the hook yet, try again,” Matt said.

He pouted. But he tried it again.

Still foul.

“Third time’s a charm.”

“Are you torturing me in broad daylight?” Miles croaked.

“Absolutely. One more time.”

Ugh. Fine.

The last time wasn’t so bad. Matt gave him a stunning grin.

“Better get used to it, kiddo. Coffee’s gonna be your best friend in the next couple years here.”

It was almost as if he was saying something else here. Something Miles couldn’t decipher quite clearly yet, but there was something there and he thought that maybe it was fondness?

“Hey, by the way, how the fuck do I ditch this dog?”

He couldn’t help it, that one made him laugh.

 

 

“Tuesday, you’re HOME,” was how Tats Spidey greeted them all that night. Or greeted Tuesday anyways. Tues was stoked to see him and started wagging her whole body and dancing. Tats Spidey threw up his arms and riled her up even more. Miles bit his tongue, but couldn’t quite get rid of the memory of her shaky old legs.

Tats Spidey was in his work clothes this time and he actually looked like a scientist. His lab coat had the Stark Industries emblem stamped on his pocket and the same pocket had three highlighters and, as far as Miles could tell, no pens. None.

He had a bucket in one hand, which he carefully did not swing even a little as he led them through the white maze of Stark Industries to a voice-activated elevator.

Gwen asked him what the bucket was for and he blinked like he’d forgotten he’d been holding it then screeched up at the elevator to let him off at floor 40. Tuesday chased after him down the hallway where they heard him shouting “AH, AH, AH. Huh-uh. Nice try. No one in here has authorization, and so help me god, y’all will not disgrace us in front of visitors again. We already played this game once. _Bucket_ , Lovett.”

“It’s for science!”

“Lies. Bucket.”

“Peter, science!”

“I am science, gimme. Consider it a sacrifice. Thank you. Martinez? Johnston?”

The distinct rattle of heavy objects being dropped in the bucket emitted from the room Tats Spidey was holding up and he re-emerged followed by calls for his impeachment, but these were immediately abandoned when the folks in there caught sight of Tues, which caused a whole new sensation Tats Spidey had to put down.

He rejoined them in the elevator with a happy Tues again like nothing had happened and then he cleared them to go up to Lab 51, only to change his mind at the last second and ask to be taken to Basement Lab 23 instead.

The bucket was full of propane lighters and several flasks with stoppers in their mouths. Peter B. made Gwen stand next to it and plastered himself against the wall for the entire ride up, which did nothing but freak everyone else in the space out even more.

 

 

Tats Spidey burst out of the elevator before anyone else, calling for Dr. Banner. Dr. Banner poked his head out from behind a wall and jabbed a finger his way, which made him freeze in place.

“No dogs,” he said. Tats Spidey looked down at Tues.

“But she’s a service dog,” he argued.

“Ser--? No. No dogs.”

Tuesday wagged her plume and Tats Spidey dropped down to break the news to her. Dr. Banner waved the rest of them over around him.

 

 

Dr. Banner’s lab was darker, much, much, darker than the rest of the building. He had LED lights flickering all over the walls and also appeared to have multiple different types of liquids chilling out in rows across his lab tables. Tats Spidey grimaced at them and disappeared while Banner introduced the rest of them to The Tank, Peter’s temporary home. The Tank laid horizontally, to Miles’s surprise and Peter lay in it, in warm water, peacefully. Maybe it was Miles’s wishful thinking, but his face seemed to have relaxed a little bit.

Tats Spidey came back into the room with some kind of base-board like devices with a little flat foot fitted to them which he affixed to the sides of the table to make it into a huge tray with walls. It made a huge racket.

“Spill hazard,” he growled at Banner when he stopped in his explanation that Peter’s vitals were looking promising to tell Tats Spidey to stop that.

“I am a professional, Peter,” he sighed.

Tats Spidey picked up and rattled his bucket at him.

“This place is full of professionals,” he snipped. Then turned on his heel to go tape down the mass of cables crawling across Banner’s floor. It dawned on Miles that this was literally his job. Protecting scientists from themselves. That was what he did. That’s why he was the way he was.

“Is he the bad guy here?” he asked Peter B. in a whisper. Peter B. snorted and choked trying to hide it.

Dr. Banner clawed his hands at the guy’s back, then shook his head and returned to Peter in the tank.

“Likes I was saying, your buddy’s—”

“Almost back at 100% hp,” Tats Spidey said over the sound of duct tape between unrolled.

“Well, no. Thank you, Peter, this is not your area of expertise, you’re dismissed. No, he’s not back to 100%, but he’s much more stable now. We monitored him last night and his cells stopped doing the uh, glitching thing around 2am and since then they’ve become more and more—I don’t know how else to explain this—solid? Thor says he smells less like ozone, which is the less scientific way of saying the same thing, I guess. Anyways, we’re thinking that he might be stable enough to try to wake up soon. Didn’t know if you guys wanted that to be here or somewhere else.”

Peter could wake up? They could wake him up?

“Maybe,” Dr. Banner said, “Not quite sure how at the moment. Pete’s got some ideas which we all hate, if you want them.”

Miles looked away from Peter’s pale, sleeping face, dyed a light blue by the water around him, in order to examine Tats Spidey. He’d started dumping the flasks by Dr. Banner’s sink into the chemical waste barrel. He looked back at them quizzically. Dr. Banner cleared his throat.

“Oh, right. I made a playlist for him,” Tats Spidey said. He flicked a glass and squinted at the bubbles in it before declaring it safe to go down the sink.

Ominous.

“And failing that,” he continued, “Wade lent me a gun.”

What.

“Which I am not allowed to shoot; I’m supposed to give it to the party with at least 10% more sense and aim than me. Then they can shoot it. No one could sleep through that, but just on the off chance Zombie Man can, I also went and borrowed my lawyer’s alarm clock—now that thing can wake the dead—he doesn’t know I stole it though, so let’s, uh. Not mention that for now.”

Tats Spidey was literally just wandering around through life, begging for an ass beating. Peter B. cleared his throat and gave Dr. Banner his attention again.

“In your professional opinion, which of those is the best option?” he asked.

Banner sighed.

“Well, in my professional opinion, we should let him wake up on his own. But Pete’s explained to me what’s going on with your whole, uh, situation here. So why don’t we start gently and move up?”

That sounded fair.

 

 

“Peter Benjamin, you will play that shit in my presence at your own peril,” Dr. Banner threatened from behind a clipboard as Tats Spidey produced an SI laptop with Spotify on its screen. Miles thought it was weird that Spotify was green. Peter B. told him Spotify was supposed to be green.

Gwen said no, it was cyan and Miles had to chew really, really hard on his tongue because, _no_ , guys; it was purple.

“It’s for _science_ , Doc.”

“If this is some Fall Out Boy nonsense—”

“God, Bruce, way to be outta touch. Nah, man. This is some light listening. Just some little ditties me and MJ put together, that’s all.”

It was not.

The name of the playlist was ‘raise the roof’ and it turned out to be less of an artistic choice and more of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 

 

Tony Stark himself came into the lab to scream over the metal that he’d received fourteen noise complaints in the last ten minutes. He turned the music off and menaced Tats Spidey in one of the corners of the lab while they all glitched and verified that they still had ear drums and while Dr. Banner took another reading of Peter’s vitals.

“You scared the dog, Peter,” Stark scolded over in the corner. “Go apologize.” Tats Spidey went, but only apparently for the dog.

Dr. Banner said that there had been a slight jump in Peter’s vitals, which was, unfortunately for them, a good sign. Tats Spidey was onto something.

 

 

Miles had never heard a blind person’s alarm clock before and it was the _worst thing ever_. It shrieked the date and time, over and over and over. Relentless. Like someone pounding a hammer with single-minded devotion right in Miles’s ear. Tats Spidey had evidently anticipated this and disappeared to return with protective headgear for everyone. He had also apparently called Tuesday’s dad to come pick her up.

Mr. Murdock arrived around Minute 30 of the horrible alarm going off and Peter’s heartbeat jumping with it and then nearly strangled Tats Spidey in the hallway outside. Mr. Stark had to come back up from his own lab and get involved to separate them. Afterwards, Mr. Murdock stomped into the room, hip-checked the table-turned-tray, swore, and then whacked the alarm off.

“Larceny is a crime,” he informed Tats Spidey, all up in his space again.

“You’re a crime,” Tats Spidey grumbled back. He cringed a bit under the intense scrutiny.

“No, but I’m about to be.”

“Mr. Murdock, I didn’t realize you were still in the city,” Dr. Banner greeted.

“’Bout to get stationed for life at fucking Riker’s,” Mr. Murdock threatened at Tats Spidey. He covered his head to escape the guy’s unyielding, although unseeing, gaze.

“Well, that’s fine, but can you please remove the dog from my lab?”

Now Dr. Banner had Mr. Murdock’s furious attention.

“She’s a guide dog,” he snarled. Dr. Banner looked up from the monitor tracking Peter’s vitals with surprise on his face. He studied Mr. Murdock for a long moment.

“Mr. Murdock, you wouldn’t happen to know a guy named Dare—”

“I’m leaving, you are all menaces to society; disgraces to law and order, all of you,” Mr. Murdock snapped. He whistled and Tuesday came to his left side immediately. They left without looking back.

Dr. Banner watched him go and then eyed Tats Spidey suspiciously. Tats Spidey ducked away from his gaze and loudly declared that since the music and alarm clock hadn’t worked, they had to move onto the gun.

 

 

Dr. Banner wasn’t letting any firearms go off in his lab. No firearms, no explosions, no Hulk. None of it, he said. If they wanted to run tests with explosives, then they’d do that in Tats Spidey’s lab or they’d do it in Stark’s, but they weren’t doing it in his. Peter B. shrugged and said that was cool and leaned over to hoist Peter out of his warm, salt water bath.

Miles and Gwen were tasked with toweling him off a bit while Tats Spidey got permission from Stark to use Lab 16A, which Miles hoped would be something similar to Dr. Banner’s lab. He couldn’t think of anything worse for Peter than waking up in the same sterile environment Doc Ock had subjected him to.

It wasn’t quite Banner’s lab, but it wasn’t white either, so that was something. It seemed like a type of underground greenhouse actually. Tats Spidey told them to touch nothing.

Again. Ominous.

There was a room at the back of Lab 16A which had carpet on all the walls. It had a couch in it and a little kitchenette and appeared to be a breakroom.

“So, I need brains,” Tats Spidey said once Peter had been laid out on the couch. Dr. Banner had had him dressed in a kind of waterproof wetsuit thing while he’d been in the tank, but Tats Spidey wasn’t having him taken down to Lab 16A in that. He’d located some SI clothes from the gift shop and so Peter now looked almost comfy.

“Anyone know how to make a gun shot sound without the gun shot?” Tats Spidey asked.

Gwen had an idea.

 

 

Gwen and Tats Spidey were no longer Miles’s friends. He was leaving them. They were horrible people. They threw textbooks on the ground with super-strength, popped balloons, and shattered a mirror with a baseball bat.

Tats Spidey threw together an insulated box and Gwen lit a screaming firework in it and Miles and Peter B. could not get any further into their safe corner.

Peter slept on, bless his soul.

It got to the point that Tats Spidey and Gwen were leaning right up in his face, threatening him with various forms of bodily harm, at which point Peter B. announced that they were probably done for the day. He pulled the other two off Peter’s body and made them both do deep breathing exercises on the other side of the room to regain their composure. Miles squeaked over to Peter’s side and watched him for a moment. At least his eyelashes weren’t so still anymore. He seemed to have a little more color in his face, too.

That was pretty good, Miles decided. He gave the guy’s wrist an encouraging squeeze.

Good job, Peter, he wanted to say. You’re doing great. Take it slow, we’ll take it slow with you.

Then his own wrist cracked.

 

 

A lot happened all in succession.

Miles’s wrist broke. Everyone stopped talking. And Peter tried to sink a fist into the side of Miles’s head.

It was not ideal. Thankfully, a room full of Spideys meant that there was someone on hand who could move just as fast as Miles’s new assailant and prevent further damage. Unfortunately, that person was Peter B. and unfortunately, Peter’s hindbrain decided that he was a threat, too.

They took out a wall.

They took out a wall and Peter B. kept shouting behind it, “I don’t want to hurt you, man. I don’t want to hurt you.” Peter must not have been able to process that, or understand it, or appreciate it or what the fuck ever, Miles’s wrist was broken and Tats Spidey was on him, telling him that it would be okay, to just hold it very still, while he bound it with a layer of web he’d sprayed out from his wrist.

Miles _knew_ it would be okay, but that didn’t mean that it didn’t fucking _hurt goddamnit_.

Gwen had vanished to go join the war through the wall. Miles thought he heard her voice somewhere over the crunching of concrete and impact sounds.

Tats Spidey looked at him in his face and then his own went tight. He pressed his lips together and stood up out of his kneeling. He blasted an ear-piercing whistle that made everyone cringe and groan.

At least people stopped fighting.

“Everyone is going to calm the fuck down, right now,” Tats Spidey ordered at the lower end of his voice range, “There is no goddamn need for this shit and we got a fourteen-year-old kid right now with an injury. Settle. Now. So I can call a medic.”

Miles was genuinely surprised to find himself completely calm with Tats Spidey. When he came back to him, Miles let him continue binding his hand and followed his instructions for breathing through the pain. He was a little preoccupied, and so was taken completely off guard when Tats Spidey found himself caught in the side and hurled clear to the other side of the room. By the time Miles looked up properly, all he could see was Peter’s back; his shoulders rolling in front of him.

“Get the _fuck_ off,” Peter’s once-pleasant baritone snarled.

Well, at least he was up now?

“You back the fuck off,” Tats Spidey spat, pushing himself out of the cracked wall.

“Touch the kid again, and I’ll do something I’ll regret,” Peter threatened.

“You already fucking did, pal,” Tats Spidey hurled back at him. “You did that—you hurt him.”

“Lay off.”

“Man, what’s your fuckin’ problem?” Peter B. demanded, having freed himself from the remains of the wall. Peter moved when Miles tried to lean out to see him, so that he couldn’t.

“Wait, are you? Are you protecting him?” Peter B. asked. Peter said nothing, but his face must have confirmed that.

“Hey, okay, that’s cool,” Peter B.’s voice continued. He was already dropping into de-escalation tones. Miles’s wrist throbbed. He had to clench his teeth to keep from making any noise. “It’s alright, man. Miles is one of ours, we’re just—we’re not trying to hurt him. We’re not trying to keep him from you. Take it easy, this must be really confusing for you. Why don’t we—”

“Where is this?” Peter demanded.

“—settle down and talk this out?”

“I said, where is this?”

“You’re a rude motherfucker, you know that?” Tats Spidey growled.

“You, shush,” Peter B. said, then back in Peter’s direction, he said, “We’re at Stark Industries. This isn’t your universe, or ours. It’s this guy’s. Me, I’m Peter. My name’s Peter Benjamin Parker, and I’m you, but from another dimension. This is Peter, uh—are you Peter Benjamin too or--?”

Tats Spidey sniffed derisively but allowed this.

“He’s a Peter, too. And this is Gwen, and that’s Miles. Your Miles. Our buddy. We’re all Spidermen—people—things. Spiderfolks. And we’ve been trying to find you, man. You’ve been screaming all our heads something crazy. But you’re here now and you’re with us and—”

Peter’s hand fanned out in front of Miles and he felt kind of sick. He wanted to fast forward through this whole standoff please.

“I think I’m gonna puke,” he announced, which got everyone’s attention. Including Peter’s. His wide shoulders went tense and he spun around. Miles didn’t feel the relief he thought he would upon seeing those blue eyes. But he stared into them anyways. “I think I’m going to be sick,” he said again.

Peter’s shoulders twitched and then started to rise and fall, quickly, visibly. His eyes flicked from one part of Miles to the next, from his face to the wrist he was holding, to the red spider painted on his chest. He must have recognized his own tech. Maybe Miles’s face. Whatever it was that set him off, must have been traumatizing as hell because he reeled back with wide eyes and bared teeth.

“Mi—Miles? Miles? What—did I—Oh my god. Oh my god, Miles. You went—you’re. Oh my god, did I hurt you?”

Now there was the Peter Miles knew and loved.

“Yes,” he said, making himself sound as hurt as possible.

“Oh my god, honey, I’m so sorry. Here, let me—can I touch it? Oh my god.”

“Dude, what the fuck?” Tats Spidey hissed at one of the others behind Peter’s panicking back.

Peter didn’t seem to hear him, he dropped to his knees in front of Miles and gingerly took his broken wrist into his hands. Miles gasped a bit when he turned it over and Peter’s face crumpled when he looked back up at him.

“I’m so sorry, kiddo, I’m so sorry. Is there a hospital or a medic or something we can get you seen by?”

“Yeah,” Miles told him, “Tats Spidey was going to call someone just now.”

Peter blinked at him and then turned to stare over his shoulder at the other Spideys, finally, _finally_ actually seeing them. Tats Spidey waved sarcastically.

Peter stood up and pulled Miles in close to him with a hand on his neck. He seemed really tall so close up and you know, vertical again. Was Peter B. this tall? Peter B. had to be this tall.

“You’re not--? You can help?” he asked.

“Yeah, man,” Tats Spidey said. “Provided you ain’t go apeshit and start wrecking shit again.”

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” Peter said.

“Yeah, okay. We get that, so can I like, get y’all upstairs into the med bay?” Tats Spidey asked.

Peter grimaced and glanced at Miles. He was so protective. He had no reason to be that protective, Miles had only known him for like, ten minutes tops before this. Still though, Miles gave him a nod and that seemed to be all that he needed. He nodded a little back and then turned back to the others and dipped his head in affirmation.

 

 

 


	8. pufferfish

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Hey, Tats, what did the 0 say to the 8?” Peter B. suddenly blurted out. 
> 
> Tats Spidey answered immediately with “I dunno, B, what did the 0 say to the 8?”
> 
> “Nice belt.”

Peter would not stop apologizing to anyone. Everyone. To every body, animate and inanimate, which would listen. At first, Miles and the others thought it was the shock, but after he’d apologized to Dr. Banner for the fifteenth time in not even that many minutes, they kind of started to realize it was something more than that.

“Maybe he’s got anxiety?” Tats Spidey whispered conspiratorially to Miles, Gwen, and Peter B. once Miles’s wrist was stabilized. Gwen had wound extra web around it just to be sure. She’d also started, perhaps subconsciously, to put her body between Miles and Peter, and Miles was kind of flattered that all his friends were violently protective of him, but it was getting old fast. He was more than capable of dealing with all this on his own.

“Maybe he’s got the guilt complex,” Peter B. whispered back.

“Oh, no, maybe it’s the complete lack of self-esteem; maybe he’s the poor sap who got the brunt of that one,” Tats Spidey offered.

Gwen asked both of them if they’d ever considered professional help. Tats Spidey was proud to say he had a therapist who he generally saw once a month, but lately once a week because of recent ‘regression.’ Peter B. said he didn’t need anything like that.

In front of them, Dr. Banner told Peter that if he apologized one more time, he was going to muzzle him. So Peter apologized for apologizing.

Miles didn’t know what he’d expected. He’d obviously failed to take into account in his imagination of Peter that every Spiderman everywhere was a disaster human, just in different shapes and forms. It would have been too convenient for him to have gotten the only normal Peter.

Dr. Banner tried to get Peter to talk more about what had been happening to him with Doc Ock, but Peter just kind of stared at him blankly. Then started apologizing all over again. Dr. Banner whacked his clipboard against his forehead slowly throughout this.

Apparently, Peter couldn’t remember so well.

This determined and many vitals taken, Peter was finally allowed to sit up and talk to the others again while Banner took a blood sample. Peter did not like the blood sample. Actually, it turned out, he didn’t like the needle, but was too anxious to look away from the needle and basically, just set himself up for more panic, punctuated of course, by a steady stream of ‘I’m sorry’s.

Never meet your heroes, Miles scolded himself.

Even Mr. Stark could not calm Peter down, which was surprising to everyone in this verse because, they learned, he’d been calming Tats Spidey’s anxiety for the last ten years or so. He was a champion Spidey tamer. In this verse. And possibly in this verse only.

“Listen, buddy, if you’re freaking out over this, I’m not sure you’re gonna handle outside very well,” Mr. Stark observed patiently.

Peter went stock still. Banner removed the needle from his arm and taped a piece of gauze over the hole. Miles thought he looked kind of smug when he took his sample away without Peter’s notice.

“What’s happening outside?” Peter asked.

“Absolutely nothing,” Peter B. told him. “Not a damn thing. Not a thing in the world, hey, you have an MJ yeah? You want to maybe talk to her? Will that calm you down?”

Peter’s horrified gaze went to him.

“I’m _dead_ ,” he said with his hands. “Dead, dead. Gone. Perished. Worm food. I’m not supposed to be here—if MJ sees me—if she found out, she’d _freak._ ”

Worse than you, pal? Miles thought not. Gwen shoved him but she couldn’t hide her smile.

“You want my MJ?” Tats Spidey offered. “She’s hell impersonated.”

“You love MJ,” Tony Stark scolded him.

“Yeah, when she’s not trying to maim me, or when she’s calling me an idiot, or telling Ned all my secrets. I love that MJ.”

Wow. Okay, dysfunctional relationship alert.

“Okay, maybe not MJ, then, you want to maybe see your aunt?” Peter B. tried.

“May? What. WHAT, NO.”

“Woah, woah, woah. Breathe, man. Breathe. Air in, air out. Forget it, we don’t gotta see no aunts. None.”

“They’ll target her, they always target her,”  Peter said, ensuring that Peter B. understood him by shaking the shit out of him.

“Who’s they?” Tats Spidey asked while those two tango-ed. Peter stopped to stare at him like he was a moron.

“Everyone. Always. Goblin. Ock. Fisk. The Jackal.”

“Who the fuck is the Jackal?” Tats Spidey asked. Peter B. and Peter stared at him in twin mute pity. Tats Spidey was intimidated in the face of their silence. “Are they…a mutant dingo?” he tried.

“Oh, honey.”

“Aw, kid.”

“Actually, no. I don’t like this vibe. Y’all shut up. I can’t hear you.”

 

 

It was determined that Peter was functional, not presently dying, but also highly anxious and dead set on going back to confront Doc Ock back in his and Miles’s verse like some kind of massive, interdimensional _moron_. Miles asked Gwen if she thought he could sell the guy on ekay or something. To which, naturally, she responded, “You mean ebay?”

No. No, he didn’t.

This was exhausting. Everything was exhausting.

Tats Spidey at least pitied him. He gave him a hug with his hands in the pockets of his lab coat like a giant bat and it made Miles laugh a little.

“Why don’t we do this,” he said, “You guys leave Blondie with me and my guys for a little while and figure out what the next steps are. We’ll dose him up with some anti-anxiety stuff and I’ll tie him down at my place if he starts looking a little pale. When you guys figure out if we need to chase Doc Ock or whatever, then you’ll have my team for it. It’ll be quick, we got enough people to put down a rebellion at this point.”

“Can you guys just swap for forever?” Miles asked him, breaking out the puppy eyes. Tats Spidey laughed and ruffled his hair.

“No can do, Itsy. Little Spidey would eat him alive.”

Yeah, fair.

 

 

Peter was upset and distracted by this turn of events, but mostly upset because he’d somehow decided without anyone else’s input that, not only did he need to go back home and fight Doc Ock to the death, but Miles was in grave danger and needed round the clock protection from the very same Doc Ock. He used the phrase ‘like a baby bird,’ and it was hard going not to be offended. Peter B. and Gwen tried to come to Miles’s rescue by assuring Peter that Miles was just as capable a Spiderman as anyone else, but Peter’s anxiety was Very Loud.

It practically radiated off the guy.

He got himself up, then puffed himself up and told Peter B. to move aside. The tone in the room dropped.

Tats Spidey came the rescue. He inserted himself between the two taller Peters and cheerfully told Peter that they had plenty of crime to fight in his verse, if he needed to get the jitters out. He then produced an immaculate checklist of all the people he was currently at war with, ranging from a shedload of local gangs to a crimelord operating out of Russia. He didn’t give Peter time to talk over his own nattering away of all the other Spiderman things he had to do on top of dealing with those guys. Like, he’d volunteered for another charity gig for the Avengers and had a whole hospital of sick kids to visit, not to mention he was working with some other local vigilantes to gather intel for some kind of plot involving a turf war _and_ he had to remake Little Spidey’s suit from an incident that weekend and her little sister insisted that it be even pinker this time. He couldn’t very well disappoint a nine-year-old, now could he?

“My aunt wants to wax her floors, dude; have you ever waxed a floor? Ain’t fun,” he said, waving at the others to escape while they could, “Gotta move all the furniture. I told her we should just pay a guy to do it, but she’s been watching more DIY stuff on Youtube and cannot be stopped. Hey, you any good at drywalling by chance?”

They escaped.

 

 

“Holy shit, I’m the most stable Peter Parker,” Peter B. whispered once they were safely back in his verse. MJ appeared to have gone to bed. The couch looked sad and lonely without her.

But yeah, no. Seriously. Peter B. might actually have been the most stable Peter Parker. And that was saying something because Peter B. wasn’t stable or normal in any sense of the word; the only thing that separated him from going completely off the rails was the fact that he was tired all the time and didn’t have time for people’s bullshit these days.

Gwen sighed.

“Well, at least he’s safe now,” she said. Then looked at Miles. “Why’s he so freaked out about Doc Ock?”

Miles wasn’t so sure.

“She said that she wanted to end Daredevil,” he said, “So I assume that means she wants to end me, too. I wish Peter remembered more; when he was in the In Between, he said something about it being a trap and it definitely was, but if the plan was to catch me, then why was she using him to broadcast to all of us? She said something about making other Spiderman into her ‘toys,’ but I dunno if that means she wants to study them or uh, torture them the way she tortured him.”

“If she’s trying to pull other Spidermen out of their verses to keep them in yours, that’s bad. Potentially catastrophic, actually,” Peter B. thought out loud. Gwen raised an eyebrow at him.

“Because we’re all _so_ important,” she said.

Peter B. squinted at her.

“Gwen, know that I’m not trying to be a dick here, but yeah. We are actually. Hella important. Think about it, how many people do you save on the daily? Per week? Like, on average?”

Gwen pursed her lips. She didn’t like where this was going. It sounded like the start of some kind of old-man knowledge drop.

“Two a night or something. Bad weeks, maybe five or so,” she finally said.

“Right, now think about it like this,” Peter B. said with his hands, “You save a mom. Single mom; dad up and left the kids. You know who else you save that night? Baby 1, 2, and possibly 3; you throw one good punch and now they are no longer facing a life in foster care. That’s four lives, girl. And that’s not even counting all the folks and ideas and like, wider impact things relying on that person being about to do what they do best. ‘Cause if that single mom is, say, a nurse or a 911 dispatcher, those are hundreds of additional lives you’ve saved. And it goes out; those circles get bigger and bigger.

 Little folks do big things. People like us, we have a huge impact, it’s just hard to see sometimes. So yeah, I know we’re all various types of fuck-up, but we’re also stupid important in our verses. Doc Ock takes one of us out of commission for a day, a week, maybe even just the one hour that really matters, and we’re talking hundreds, if not thousands of lives affected. Probably for the worse.”

See when he said it like that, Miles could totally see why Peter was freaking out.

“So we need to find her,” he said.

“We need to find her, _now_ ,” Gwen amended.

“Not now,” Peter B. said, “Let’s think ASAP. We’ve got covers to keep. Miles, you missed school again, didn’t you? Not good. Suspicious. We need a few days to reestablish a cover, but also to make her feel safe. Put her at ease.”

“And then what?” Gwen asked.

“Then we ambush her and make her talk,” Peter B. decided.

“Okay, how do we do that?” Miles asked him.

Peter B. thought about it.

“Maybe we just give her exactly what she wants?” he said.

“Which is?” Gwen pressed.

“Spiderman and Daredevil.”

 

 

Ganke was painfully suspicious of Miles’s return home. He poked at him through the bars of the bunkbed and asked him if he didn’t have something more important to be doing than homework. He did not. Well, not really. Keeping a cover was just as important as doing Spiderman work in a lot of ways.

It wasn’t all dull times, though. Hilariously, Peter had discovered that he could send Miles text messages from Tats Spidey’s phone. It didn’t work for Tats Spidey (he’d tried and was offended by the lack of success), but it worked for him, and he sent Miles a running commentary of the misery he was currently enduring in the ‘verse with the weird Spotify,’ between all his pleas to be allowed to protect him.

Miles screenshotted the in-between bits so that he could show Gwen and Peter B. later.

They read things like:

 **PP:** we are revarnishing a floor?????

 **PP:** I don’t know how to do this?? Miles, this May is crazy, she does not care that none of us know how to do this.

 **PP:** apparently we’re doing it anyways? Even though all of these labels seem to me to suggest that this will not work. No one’s reading the labels but me. Why are they like this? You can’t just pray for floor varnish and hope it works out.

 **PP:** oh, nvm, we’re not praying. We’re putting salt around the house, my bad. That’s normal. We have to purify the space. Yes, of course, how could I have misunderstood.

 **PP:** Miles, have you heard anything from Dr. Ock? Because WE SURE HAVE

 **PP:** oh my god, she’s (he’s? They’re?) horrible in every universe. This one tried to kill the little Miles over here ☹ He’s so small, he called me such bad names why is everyone so grumpy??

 **PP:** Matt is so OLD. HE’S GINGER MILES WHAT WHAT WHAT

 **PP:** HE IS NOT FRIENDLY. HE THREATENED TO END ME JUST NOW. I didn’t even say anything????? The other peter says he’s just like that sometimes but that is not an ANSWER MILES

At least Peter’s anxiety was entertaining. Miles eventually gave in to Ganke’s prodding and swore him to secrecy, before verifying with him that he really did want to see the texts Miles kept smothering his face in his pillow for. He warned Ganke that he would never again look at all his Spiderman gear in the same light, but Ganke was resolute.

He was not disappointed.

 

 

They waited four days. Four days of Peter suffering. Four days of organizing on everyone’s parts.

But then the evening arrived and Peter finally, _finally_ got to come home and he spent a full five minutes suffocating Miles in a grateful hug while the others looked on.

Tats Spidey had lent him a suit. It wasn’t quite as fire-engine red as his own. Tats Spidey had also amassed a small army. He and his three other Spideys stood by with the addition of Dave, now in full Daredevil suit, Mr. Murdock in _his_ Daredevil suit (although Miles wasn’t sure he’d call it a suit), and Wade bringing up the rear with his signature swords sticking out of his back.

Gwen didn’t show for a long minute. She said she wouldn’t. She said that it was going to be a timing thing on her part and they needed to reach out to her when Doc Ock showed. It was very important that they did it then and only then.

The last to arrive to the party on a rooftop a good two miles away from the warehouse was Matt. He turned up with his helmet and zeroed in almost instantly on Peter. They both noticed each other and went still for a second before surging forward and colliding into a hug which involved a whole lot of patting and rocking and wet-sounding laughter.

Then, when they collected themselves, Miles introduced Matt to the crew.

His lip twitched in the corner of his cheek and Peter clapped a firm hand on his shoulder.

“They’re real,” he confirmed at Matt’s grasping back at him in horror.

“My god, Red, it’s you when you were young and hopeful,” Wade chimed up from behind Dave.

“I think the description you’re looking for is ‘dumb as a fuckin’ rock,’ but let’s go with that,” Mr. Murdock called behind him.

Matt’s mouth dropped open in offense.

“Do you hear this? Is that me?” he asked Miles. Miles swallowed his snicker and confirmed. “Wow,” Matt breathed. “What an asshole.”

“Hey, come say that to my face, little man,” Mr. Murdock barked over the folks in front of him this time.

Matt’s face did something complicated and Peter replaced the hand on his shoulder with an elbow so he could kind of drape his forearm across Matt’s chest.

“We don’t need to do that,” he said casually.

“We do,” Mr. Murdock called.

“We don’t,” Dave called from beside him. Mr. Murdock shoved him and asked him what he was thinking, they had an image to keep up. Little Spidey asked what it was, and Mr. Murdock was offended enough to hiss at her. She got all up into his space, and he fled to Dave’s other side. She followed.

“Wade, make them stop,” Tats Spidey groaned over the commotion going on back there. Wade was busy having the time of his life. He’d coaxed Bitsy over to take selfies with him in the back of their group. At Tats Spidey’s call, however, he stood up straight and moved to tower over Mr. Murdock (and Dave and Little Spidey by proximity) with his hands on his hips.

“Redthew. Stop this nonsense,” he commanded.

Mr. Murdock tipped his head up to him.

“No.”

Wade deflated.

“I tried, Pete, you see? He’s just out of control.”

Mr. Murdock grinned in Tats Spidey’s direction, so proud of himself.

“I’m out of control,” he assured Tats Spidey. Tats Spidey stared between the two of them with flat eyebrows.

“Neither of you are funny,” he said.

“We’re hilarious, Red, come here snookums, we’re not wanted here,” Wade said.

Mr. Murdock allowed himself to be wrapped up in Wade’s arms. Both he and Wade stared prissily at Tats Spidey who seemed to be graduating to new levels of done-ness. Peter B. levels of done-ness.

“I should have drowned both of you last year while I had the chance,” he decided.

“Alright, alright, that’s enough," Peter B. called. He must have finally gotten the signal from Gwen that she was in position on her side of things. “We’ve called you all together here to stop a mad woman from ruining everyone’s lives. We appreciate all y’all coming out on short notice, and we’re gonna appreciate everyone’s patience. This is a going to be kind of piecework deal.”

 

 

The plan was that Peter and Miles were going to go back down to the lab. They were going to replace the computer Peter B. had stolen and log in to Doc Ock’s account. They were going to send her a skype message from Peter, saying that he’d woken up and was desperate to go back to sleep. He would say that some other Spidermen had shown up and he didn’t understand what was going on.

Then he’d wait. And he’d try calling her, and would just so happen to turn on and leave on the computer’s webcam while he did , so Doc Ock would be able to tell that it was indeed Peter who had come back to her lab. She’d get real interested, but then Matt and Miles would show up, claiming that Peter had to come with them. Spidermen from all over where showing up and now other Daredevils too, and they needed to get everyone out of the lab before Doc Ock came back.

That should get her rapt attention. So she’d high tail it back and have everything she’d ever wanted in front of her. All these Spidermen and all these surprise Daredevils, and then one of the Spideys would get her monologuing so they could all get a handle on what the fuck she was trying to do here and then they’d take her down, take her lab down, destroy all her data, call the police, and clear out.

Given Matt’s posturing last time, it was likely that she’d bring back-up with her this time, which was hopefully going to be no problem since there was precisely two million of them.

And then they had Gwen’s thing, whatever that was.

“Alright, babies, you heard the man,” Wade announced to Team Red when Peter B.’s last ‘capeesh?’ had been answered.  They all hustled around to face him. “Chain of command is as follows. Tall, not-blonde Pete is first. Itsy follows. Who wants third? Red, not you, don’t even try.”

“I want it!”

“Alright, going to Little Spidey. Going once—”

“I volunteer!”

“Whoop, Pete’s entered the ring; go on, partner. What’s your justification?”

“I am older than twenty and I’m nominating Wade Wilson for third in command.”

“Traitor,” Little Spidey shrieked.

“Oh, Petey, I’m so flattered.”

“Vetoed by seniority,” Mr. Murdock—or Red? Everyone seemed to call him Red—announced.

“He nominates me!” Little Spidey informed the group on his behalf.

“Red, we already discussed this, you have no vote. That’s what happens with you leave the state. Everyone else, all in favor of Deadpool for third?”

Tats Spidey, Louis, Dave, and Bitsy’s arms went up. Red and Little Spidey crossed their arm and huffed. Wade graciously took the floor again.

“The people have spoken. That’s Tall, Non-blonde first, Itsy second, and me third. Meeting adjourned. Non-Blondie, Team Red is ready for action.”

 

 

They all took different paths to the warehouse, so as not to rouse suspicion with a parade of red suits headed down south. Tats Spidey and Little Spidey broke off from their group and the troop of three Daredevils broke apart to go hurtling down the sides of buildings before disappearing into the darkness of the street. Miles went with Peter.

Peter was so happy to be back home in his NYC and he was so happy to be web-slinging alongside Miles. They swung past each other in long, pendulum arcs. At the crest of his arcs, Peter let himself fall for barely a second before sending out the next line.

It was unnecessary. A type of flourish or luxury.

Miles did that, too. The little drop at the top held within it a moment to see, to really, truly appreciate the height and the lights of the city. It didn’t last long enough to take a breath, but it felt like one anyways.

He liked to think that the leaps they took on the way down south that night were a kind of sigh of relief.  

 

 

They all got to the warehouse and were faced with its recently boarded up, poorly patched entrance. Peter shivered and both Peter B. and Tats Spidey instinctually tucked in close to him for support. It was kind of cute. Miles kind of wanted to know what would happen if you called their name. Would they all twitch at once or had they already adapted to their new monikers?

Finally, Peter took a deep breath and stepped out of the Peter huddle to plant a foot into the pile of rubble. It crunched and he swallowed hard.

“Hey, Tats, what did the 0 say to the 8?” Peter B. suddenly blurted out.

Tats Spidey answered immediately with “I dunno, B, what _did_ the 0 say to the 8?”

“Nice belt.”

Little Spidey made a soft dying noise and hid in Louis’s side. He shook a little in silent mirth. Peter’s lip twitched and his shoulders relaxed a fraction. He let out another, faster breath, and then ducked through the space between a few of the caved in boards at the warehouse entrance. He and the backpack he’d borrowed from Tats Spidey disappeared into the dark.

 “Hey, no, I got one,” Tats Spidey announced with a hint more volume.

“Go on,” Peter B. said, also just a little louder than necessary.

“What do you call a seagull that flies over a bay?”

“I dunno, what?”

“A bagel.”

“Oh my _god_ ,” Little Spidey whimpered.

Miles’s phone lit up with a text.

 **PP:** Bagel?? Now that’s just embarrassing.

 **PP:** In safely. Headed down. Dark as hell, watch your step.

 

 

Miles relayed the text and before he knew it, Matt had broken away from the group and slipped through the crack after Peter like a cat. He jerked forward after him, but a hand caught the back of his suit and he looked up to see that it was Wade.

“He’s good, Itsy. He’s just going in to guide his buddy down safely.”

Wade let go of his suit and stood back. He was much more gentle than he looked.

 

 

Fifteen minutes in and another text arrived.

 **PP:** found the lab. Power’s out. Matt’s trying to find a switch.

“Unexpected hurdle,” Tats Spidey noted.

“I can jump it?” Bitsy offered.

Jump it?

Tats Spidey deferred to Peter B. without success.

“I dunno what you’re talking about,” Peter B. said.

“He’s got an electricity thing,” Tats Spidey explained. Bitsy held his hands about six inches part and they sparked with blue light. Peter B. was intrigued. Miles remembered that he and Gwen hadn’t been there when he’d delivered a similar shock to Fisk.

“You have it too, kiddo?” he asked Miles.

“Yeah.”

Peter B. hummed.

“Alright, one of you goes down. If you can’t get it going, we’ll send the other. Pick between yourselves or rock, paper, scissors for it.”

Bitsy looked at Miles for a long moment.

“They’re your friends,” he said.

Miles wanted to hug the guy. He resolved to later. He hopped forward, but a hand caught his elbow gently before he got through the crack in the boards.

“I’ll be your guide,” Red said.

 

 

Red was way more chilled out without his teammates to antagonize him. He didn’t talk much, but he did instruct Miles to hold onto his elbow like _he_ was the blind person in their duo, and he moved comfortably through the dark, although every couple of yards or so, he stopped and drew Miles in close to him before using one of his billy clubs to tap on things. He’d go stiff for a minute, then he’d ease up and press on.

“What does that do?” Miles finally asked once Red said they’d reached the stairs and ladder.

“Echoes,” Red said. “Can’t see, so gotta listen. Helps me figure out where things are.”

That was so cool.

“Are you like a dolphin?”

Red laughed loud and happy and the sound made Miles jump at first, but really, it was an (almost) empty warehouse. They didn’t have to be worried about running into anyone by Matt and Peter.

“A dolphin, yeah, I’m like a fuckin’ dolphin,” Red mumbled in delight, tapping gently on the stair rail. “Gotta remember that one. Stairs or ladder?”

Huh-uh. Miles learned from his mistakes.

“Stairs, please.”

“Ah, I was hoping you’d say that.”

 

 

“Why do you have a dog if you can hear like a dolphin,” Miles asked. It was much easier to go down the stairs, even if it was a little scary to not know where exactly your foot was on them. They made a grating, hollow sound with every step, no matter how carefully he set his foot down.

“’Cause she’s my darlin’,” Red said. He didn’t appear concerned with making a ruckus on the stairs. Very unlike someone else Miles happened to know. Someone who preferred helmets and ladders. “And she gives me a break sometimes.”

“Does she smell bad to you?”

“Ehn. She used to. I got used to it, though. Gave her more baths, too.”

“Is she old?”

“Oh, yeah. She’s a little old lady, bless her. Her sister’s mission in life is to drive us all out of minds.”

“She has a sister?”

“She does indeed, I’ll introduce you when we get back up to the surface.”

 

 

“How come my Matt’s so bad at this?” Miles couldn’t help but ask after ten minutes of navigating without having gotten stuck or having to stutter even once.

“Not sure. Probably hasn’t had to play guide before. Might also be distracted by you and your Peter,” Red said.  “You probably sound and smell good to him, so he keeps checking on you to make sure you’re alright.”

Woah. Weird.

“That’s creepy.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“Do your Peter and Miles smell good to you?”

“No, not really. Sorry, I’m not explaining it right. It’s not exactly ‘good,’ it’s more like warm? Not sure. It’s hard to describe. We don’t experience things the same way, me and you.”

“That’s really cool.”

Red huffed another laugh.

“Yeah, I guess it is a little cool,” he said. He pulled Miles’s hand gently so that he took the last step down.

Huh. Another thing Red didn’t have in common with Matt. He was almost humble.

 

 

Miles knew when they made it to the lab door because he could hear Matt cursing softly inside. Peter sounded like he was trying to describe the wires in a fuse box without much success. Red stepped up into the lab and told Miles to mind the stair, then unhooked his hand and went over to try to figure out what the other Matt was doing.

“Miles?” Peter asked into the dark.

“Yeah, it’s me,” he said holding out his hands and moving towards the fussing going on in the closest corner. His fingers bumped against something firm and it moved out of his way. A broad hand came up against the small of his back and moved him forward and then the same hand and its twin caught ahold of both of his own.

“Right here,” Red said, laying his fingers onto a set of switches.

There. Okay. He relaxed his shoulders and reached inward for the Spidey Sense. It rang back at him and zipped up and down his back. Made him shiver. The hair on his neck stood up.

Good. Now count.

The Spidey Sense went up his back into his neck.

One.

It jumped down to the middle of his spine.

Two.

Up. Three.

Down. Four.

Up—Now.

The sparks were blue. They lit the fuse box up. A beat later, a humming noise started up and the lights started flickering. They stabilized and revealed both Daredevils staring straight up at the ceiling above the fuse box and Peter with his backpack off and his chin resting patiently on top of the computer tower that had once lived in it.

“Well, I think that’s our cue to scram,” Red said. He turned his face in Peter’s direction and cocked it slowly to the side.

“Take it easy, kiddo,” he said, “There’s scarier things in the world than this gal. You’ve been through one of them already.”

Peter gave a little smile.

“Thanks, big guy,” he said. “Good to know the threats come from a place of love.”

Red scoffed.

“I’m a teddy bear,” he said. He grabbed the back of Matt’s helmet and gave him a push towards the door and waved Miles over to follow. “We’re gonna go play in the riot shields now, if you need something, just give us a holler.”

Play in the what now?

“I already played in the riot shields,” Matt whined.

“Well you’re gonna play again,” Red snipped.

Miles looked over his shoulder and waved at Peter. He missed it, though. He’d dropped his face towards the ground in front of the tower.

“Hey, Peter,” he said. Peter looked up at him and gave another little smile of acknowledgement.

“You’re my hero.”

Peter’s face kind of crumpled for a moment, but he pulled himself together, clenched his jaw and nodded. Then he looked back up at Miles, standing in the trapezoid of florescent light in front of the little lab.

“Copy that, Spiderman,” he said. “Everything is going to be just fine.”

He almost sounded like he believed it, too.

He pulled the mask on. Miles followed suit. Then he turned around and stepped back into the dark.

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ooooh we're getting into the shit now. I'm rattling over here, but gotta do some real people work. I'll get back to y'all when I get a second away from suffering the slings and arrows of academia
> 
> Also I refuse to believe that ITSV Peter was any better than any of the other Peters. Refuse. No force on earth can make me believe that he was not a nervous wreck who used Spiderman as an hypercompetent, suave alter ego, i.e. a type of compensation for his meekness/being a pushover in real life.


	9. four square

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gwen was busy.

Lights out.

Dark in.

Miles watched Peter set up the computer through his shadows in the trapezoid of light. He went fast. Plugs to plugs. Passwords went through. The whole thing booted up with a welcoming noise which belied the situation they were in.

Miles heard keys clacking. And then, just barely under all that, a soft exhale of breath.

He knew that breath.

 _I can do this_. It said. _Go time._

Keys started clacking again, and the skype call started. It rang two times, then three times. But on the fifth time, the hair on the back of Miles’s neck stood up and he reached a hand back behind him. Matt’s bony fingers wrapped in coarse cloth answered. Miles squeezed them.

“Something’s wrong,” Miles said.

“What—”

The phone picked up.

And everything went out.

 

 

Blackness.

 

 

Blackness.

 

 

Blackness.

 

 

“Peter?” Miles said. The trapezoid of light was gone. He tried to look behind him. “Matt? Red?”

He held out a hand and no one reached back.

“Peter?” he called again, louder this time. “Matt?”

His voice didn’t echo.

His fingers caught on something and he jerked his head to the side and caught a burst of sparks; green, teal and pink. They lit up his hand for a second and fizzled out like the remnants of fireworks in the July sky.

The in-between. He was back in the in-between, where Peter had been before; where Red and Tats Spidey’s fight had plunged him what felt like ages ago now.

“PETER,” he shouted. His breath came faster; he couldn’t stay still. He had to move. He started running and the ripples went with him.

There was nothing in front of him; the sparks lit only his feet. And after a couple seconds, he slowed to a halt and watched them die off again around him with a stone sinking further and further into his stomach.

If they were here, in the in-between, then where was Doc Ock? Where was everyone else? Were they actually here or were their bodies still back in the warehouse? What if they were? What if everyone was there, waiting for their signal and Peter and Miles had blinked out.

What if Red and Matt had been left guarding two bodies?

What if

What if

“Miles?”

He wanted to cry.

“Peter?” he called.

“Miles! Move so I can see you!”

His heart was up in his throat and he could barely swallow and he didn’t know what else to do so he threw a punch into the dark. The lights went with him.

“Gotcha!”

His throat hurt but he couldn’t cry.

They’d let everyone down.

Let them right into a trap. It had to be another trap. That was exactly what Doc Ock had wanted—she knew they’d come back and she knew they weren’t dumb enough to come alone.

He felt so, so stupid anyhow.

“Hey! There you are, okay, so, I get that this seems bad but—Miles? Buddy, what’s--? No, no, hey, it’s okay. We can fix this.”

Peter’s hands felt big when they wrapped around his wrists and pulled them away from his face. He wasn’t hidden by shadows, somehow, despite the darkness. He pulled off his mask and pulled Miles’s arms around his own back and wrapped his much longer ones around Miles’s shoulders and somehow, somehow he was warm.

“Miles, it’s going to be okay,” he said. His voice rumbled in his chest.

“She’s got you again,” Miles managed to choke.

“She’s got us, actually,” Peter noted offhandedly. “And she’s probably been monologuing at Matt and Red for like, 45 minutes by this point.”

The realization make Miles hiccup and he pressed himself deeper into Peter’s chest.

“We fucked up,” he sobbed. “She’s gonna kill them.”

Peter hummed and rocked back and forth a bit, making a show of thinking.

“Naaah,” he finally decided, sounding 100% exactly like Peter B.

“What?” Miles sniffed.

“I said, nah. Like, kill? Nah. You don’t know Matt very well, he’s secretly a cockroach. Damn near impossible to kill. Fisk tried to drown him in the Hudson last year and he came up swinging and then lived long enough to get hypothermia. And then he lived long enough for me to break his jaw in, uh, unfortunate circumstances. And _then_ he lived long enough to meet you. If Red’s anything like him, we couldn’t be safer. No one could.”

That didn’t make him feel any better.

“But what if—”

“We can’t think about what ifs right now, Miles, Doc Ock’s attacking our friends.”

Miles pulled out his grip and stared up at him.

“What do we do then?” he asked with his hands feeling wide and empty, “How do we get out of here? How do we wake up? How did you wake up?”

Peter stared at him.

“I heard you,” he said.

“That’s not helpful,” Miles snapped, “I’m right here and there’s no one else from our verse over there.”

Peter blinked at him and Miles could not, for the life of him, understand why he was so calm. He gestured at him in frustration trying to convey these strong thoughts. Peter watched him, almost amused.

“You know something crazy?” he said. “Being here chills me way out.”

Wait. What?

“Like, when I’m not in some torture cycle of waking up to remember getting hulk-smashed and then falling back to sleep: way chill. You know how many meds I used to have to take before to get to this level of chill?”

Meds? Why were they talking about meds? Their friends were _dying_.

“Mostly anxiety stuff, nothing like what Tats takes, though. Man, those are some next level shit. He is truly living on that nonfunctional edge. Really, he just needs a new job if you ask me. He claims it’s not so bad, something about coming in waves which I cannot relate to at all. Mine’s like, there’s the Spidey Sense and then the constant hum below that is like a blanket of constant anxiety.”

This was already a surreal experience. And it was only getting more surreal the longer this conversation went on.

“Peter,” Miles said slowly. “I’m happy you are chilled out. That’s great, but. People. Are. _Dying._ How do we wake up?”

“Hmm?”

“Wake up. How do we wake up? We need someone to wake us up, but you only woke up because I touched you, yeah? That is a problem, see, because I am here and you are here, and so we cannot wake each other up. Right? Okay?”

“Oh, wonder if Matt could do it.”

Miles really needed high-key anxiety Peter to come back, now. That guy got shit done.

“Matt cannot do it,” he said carefully, “Because he is busy being killed _and_ he’s not a Spiderman and can’t reach through to other Spidermen.”

“Oh, I think I get it now.”

Thank Jesus.

“You know, it should be much more disturbing.”

And they were off again.

“Peter, come on, man. Focus,” he pleaded.

“I think I’m part of this space, now.”

Wait.

Wait, wait, wait.

“What do you mean, you’re part of this space now?” Miles asked, taking a step back so he could better see the guy’s face.

“Ock says she put me half-in, half-out,” Peter said, watching Miles. “When I went home with you, I thought I felt right, but I don’t think I did now. This feels right. I feel like, I dunno.” He held up a hand and laid it flat in the air like it was resting against something solid. Light pulsed around it faintly for a moment and then it was gone again.

“It feels real,” Peter said.

Miles stared up at him.

“I’m not leaving you here,” he said.

“Miles.”

“I’m _not_ leaving you here to die again. Don’t make me do that.”

“Miles, if what she wants is me, then—”

“No. Don’t you get it? This isn’t a sacrifice. If she has you, even a piece of you, even a part of you that doesn’t feel like you anymore, she’ll just do this over and over. Now I’m stuck here, too. And it doesn’t feel right to me. And it doesn’t chill me out and I don’t want it to. Come on, Peter, snap out of this, you’re _Spiderman._ Our friends are in danger. We need to help them.”

He didn’t realize how desperate he sounded until he wasn’t talking anymore. Just panting. Staring up at his hero who blinked once, then twice, and bowed his head.

“You’re right,” he said.

Thank god.

“I’d never be this fucking chilled out in any universe, she’s doing something to me to keep me way steady. And actually, feels a little like wading through soup…”

He kind of stopped.

Miles waited. Then snapped his fingers.

He jerked back.

“Soup!” he cried, then recovered, “Okay, soup. Wow. Very distracting. Yeah no. I am drugged to the fucking teeth somewhere. Okay, that is a big problem, that’s me useless. We gotta do something before you get useless, too.”

“Yes, so _what_?” Miles pleaded.

“Hmm?”

Jesus fucking Christ. It wasn’t Peter’s fault, whatever this was. He was absolutely intoxicated. Miles had to repeat this to himself a few times so he wouldn’t snap at the guy again. He started pacing in a circle, trying to think, think, _think._

They were stuck in the in-between. They needed to get back to their verse before Doc Ock murdered their bodies or their friends. They needed some kind of connection back to their verse. Peter B. was there.

Miles stopped and threw his hands up and crushed his eyes closed as hard as he could. Thinking about Peter B. Peter B. constantly smelled like coffee, even when he hadn’t been drinking coffee. He also constantly had stubble which he lamented just as constantly. Something about being served second divorce papers in the case a full beard ever made an appearance in his apartment.

Stubble and coffee.

Stubble and coffee.

He tried to press into the space. But there was nothing. It was like he couldn’t keep a grip on the image of the guy. Almost like he was too far away, somehow.

“Peter,” he snapped, getting Peter’s immediate and undivided attention. “Reach out to Tats.”

“Who?”

Right, how could he have forgotten?

“Tats Spidey. The Peter with the tattoos. Daffodils on this side, you spent the last week with him?”

“Ah, yeah. They’re his aunt’s favorite flower.”

Adorable. Not helpful.

“Reach out to him,” Miles repeated.

“Reach?”

“CALL HIM.”

“Ah. Right-o.”

Jesus Christ. No wonder Spiderman didn’t do drugs. He was flat out useless on them. Note to self: check susceptibility to mind-altering substances at a later date.

Peter pressed a hand against that weird semi-solid surface again and closed his eyes. Miles wondered if maybe he needed to start up a chant of ‘daffodils and May” to keep him on track, but to his surprise, Peter’s hand sunk through the space easily and was answered almost immediately by a red one.

“WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU?” Tats Spidey roared.

Things had very clearly gone to shit behind him. Miles couldn’t see much, but he could see Wade choking a guy against a wall with his own gun and Little Spidey slamming a vicious downward kick into a guy’s shoulder. Both victims wore black tact-gear and were armed to the teeth.

“SHE TEAMED UP WITH FUCKING FISK IN PRISON,” Tats Spidey continued, pausing to duck a blow and hurl web at a few guys’ eyes and leave them to their fate at the hands of Bitsy, who dutifully tased them with his hands. “WE GOT FIFTY MOTHERFUCKERS HERE AND NO DOUBLE DS WHATSOEVER.”

No Double Ds?

“We’re in the in-between," Miles said. He tried to get a hand through to Tats Spidey’s side but cracked his knuckles against some kind of barrier. Tats Spidey reeled back in surprise and then thrust a hand forward to grab at Miles’s shoulder. He ran into the same problem. He knocked his fingers against the barrier a few times, then tried to punch it, only to shout out in pain when his hand gave before it did.

“We’re stuck,” Miles said.  “Peter’s drugged, he’s all dopey and stupid. I think Doc Ock did something to us down there, I think our bodies are still there. Matt and Red are too, they need help.”

“ _We_ need help,” Tats Spidey said. “Fuck. FUCK. Okay, uh—PETER. BIG PETE. Hey, come deal with this. They’re stuck in the space Blondie was in before and—get the _fuck_ off me I’m talking—apparently some shit is going down with Ock. Figure it out please?”

Tats Spidey was kind of terrifyingly efficient in the face of chaos. The guy he’d thrown over his shoulder whimpered when his buddy joined him down there. Peter B. rushed over from somewhere Miles couldn’t see and let Tats Spidey tear off back to immobilize more folks behind the window with the web.

“Miles, what’s happening?” Peter B. asked.

He tried to explain as fast as possible.

“I didn’t even feel you,” Peter B. said. “Fuck. Okay, hey. Peter, whoo-hoo, hi friend—oh yeah, he’s well gone—yeah, no. That’s not gonna work. Miles, reach out to Gwen, if we can get her the signal, then maybe she can—”

A guy tried to stab Peter B. in the neck with something that looked suspiciously purple and got his ass picked up and thrown over to join Tats Spidey’s pile. Valiantly, he got up and tried to wrestle his arms out of Peter B.’s knee-jerk iron grip.

“Dude, just stop,” Peter B. snarled at him. “You ain’t gonna win this one, Christ, this is how people end up with broken arms. You want a broken arm?” The screamed expletive certainly earned him one and Peter B. breathed through his teeth at him in disappointment. He jerked back to Miles.

“Gwen,” he instructed.

“Gwen, thank you,” Miles agreed.

“Be careful.”

“Will do”

The window closed. Miles tried to reach out to Gwen as hard as he could.

He could always reach out to Gwen. She always answered.

But this time it was the same. Nothing. Like she hadn’t even noticed the nudge.

Miles muffled a frustrated scream and rounded on Peter.

“Gwen,” he commanded.

“Gwen Stacy,” Peter repeated.

“Yes, Gwen Stacy,” Miles said, then before the dumbass questions could start up again: “Green eyes, blond hair, gap-teeth. _Gwen_.”

“Point shoes,” Peter remembered.

He reached out again with his eyes closed while Miles tried to swallow his panic.

 

 

Gwen was _busy_.

Gwen could not talk to Miles or anyone else because she was screaming through the city, desperately trying not to die.

When she felt the nudge, she knew it was time, but she was not prepared to reach back and bust her knuckles on a wall. And then, once that shock was over and Miles was talking a mile a minute to her while Peter appeared to be falling asleep standing up beside him, she made an executive decision.

For the team.

God rest their souls.

She reached out to Peter B. and told him to get everyone the fuck out of there.

“We’re missing two people, Gwen.”

“Who?” she demanded.

“Two Daredevils.”

“Then they’ll just have to fucking deal,” she said. “Get the fuck out _now_. Non-negotiable.”

“No, it sounds like it’s gotten out of hand down there, we’re not throwing more bodies at that shit until we know what’s happening. Stay in your verse.”

“Peter, listen to me,” she said, “This is not an option, nowhere here is safe for me right now, so just doing what I’m asking you to do—Miles’s Peter is fading fast, we need to catch him before this shit starts all over again.”

Peter B. didn’t want to leave this, but he didn’t have a choice. Someone got a lucky shot in and nearly plunged what was definitely some type drug in a syringe right into his neck.

Yeah, no. Situation dire.

“Trust me,” she shouted.

“Alright, I trust you,” Peter B. shouted back. “But I can’t open a window for you down there—”

“You don’t have to. Get everyone back. MOVE.”

She turned around and screamed as loud as she could.

She knew he heard.

Her breath stuttered while she waited. She never waited. Everything, every muscle, every bone and sinew in her body screeched at her to run. To bolt. To get the fuck off that roof. Hell, out of the city.

She heard the blade before she heard the footsteps.

“I _love_ this game, Spiderwoman.”

Oh, buddy. You ain’t gonna like it for long.

She double-checked that the other side was clear. It was as clear as it was going to be. People were still fighting and shouting, but on the whole they were away from the window. She knew where the warehouse door would be. She knew it would be dark.

She was just going to have to take that leap.

She turned back just as the blade went into attack position.

“Catch me if you can, bitch,” she said.

And launched herself through the window.

 

 

She didn’t have time to appreciate everyone’s various ‘what the fuck?’s because she had a fucking serial killer on her tail. She went out, wove through the crowd, and threw herself through the little space she could find in the doorway. Speed was of the essence here because she was about to lose her only advantage.

It wasn’t just dark.

It was pitch black.

God _damnit_.

She had to keep moving because Murderdock wasn’t going to notice the difference.

She heard him enter, but just barely.

She heard the blade which almost connected with her rib cage much, much, clearer. It struck metal. She tried to remember how high the ceiling was and threw out a line of web, blindly.

It stuck.

She pulled _hard_ and just barely escaped the second blow. As the arc of the swing slow, she caught sight of a little light shining out of a doorway. She let go of the line and hoped the next one would connect to whatever wall was behind and over it.

It didn’t connect.

Freefall is only fun if it’s your choice.

She didn’t fall far because a mechanical something latched around her waist and hurled her into the wall she’d missed.

Well, on the upside, she’d found Doc Ock. Which meant she’d also found Miles and Peter. She caught onto the wall with a short burst of web and shuddered through the pain in her shoulder. She did not release the web. No, that would be suicide. Murderdock knew exactly where she was and she couldn’t find him for shit. What she needed was a light switch.

“Spiderwoman?” Doc Ock’s voice sang out, “How lovely of you to join us. Come here, my dear. I’ll make a matching set.”

Somehow, even though she couldn’t see him, Gwen knew that that had given Murderdock pause. He was a fucking hound. He didn’t like people touching his things and Gwen, for better or for worse, was one of his things. She delighted a little at the idea of his blood boiling.

Something moved next to her and she nearly screamed when it touched her hand.

“Sh!”

Her breath caught.

“Who are you?” she whispered.

“My name’s Matt,” the poor guy said, he sounded hurt. “I’m Miles’s friend. Come here. You’ll fall if you stay there. This is a ledge, it’s safe. Here, hold my hand.”

His hand was gloved but firm when she took it. He pulled her over onto some kind of metal surface and hissed a little at the noise she made. She was glad to have her weight off her shoulder, but when she settled down next to the body—definitely a man—she put her hand in something.

Something wet.

“Are you hurt?” she whispered.

“It’s just a flesh wound,” he said softly.

“Are you a Spidey?” she asked.

“Uh, no. Definitely not. Peter’s my Spidey. Was my Spidey— _is_ my Spidey? I dunno, things are complicated. And I’m feeling a l’il dizzy. Miles is definitely my Spidey.”

This guy was losing hella blood. Gwen could feel it, it soaked her leg. She squinted out at the darkness. She couldn’t see for shit, but Murderdock was still radio silent and seemed to be well distracted with Doc Ock’s writhing and calling. Gwen could afford to wait a minute. To stay still and not draw either of their attention. She started trying to weave a bandage for the guy next to her out of web. It didn’t take much, five pumps of web layered on top of each other. Just as she opened her mouth to ask him where the bleeding was coming from, he cut her off.

“Who’s that?” he asked.

Who’s that. She looked out into the blackness. Doc Ock was talking at someone down there. Given the lack of dead/dying sounds, it probably wasn’t Murderdock. Yet.

“I dunno. Might be Daredevil,” she said.

There was a pause.

“So, uh. _I’m_ Daredevil.”

What.

She stared into the blackness next to her.

“You’re _what?_ ”

“It’s gotta be Red, I guess. But he took a hard one into the floor. I thought he’d knocked out.”

WHAT WHAT WHAT

“Your name wouldn’t happen to be Matt Murdock, would it?” she asked as softly and with as much polite dread as she could.

Another pause.

“What? No. Psh. Who the fuck is that guy? Weird name, though. All these people and their alliterations.”

Oh god, he was Matt Murdock.

He was the friendliest, gentlest, _bleeding out_ Matt Murdock. Fuck. She’d finally found the nice one and he was going to die sitting right next to her.

“Where’s your wound?” she asked.

“Woah. Who the fuck is that?”

He could see Murderdock—or maybe not see. He could sense Murderdock. Gwen could too in her own way (her dad called this her ‘paranoia’ and sometimes he was right, but this time he was wrong).

“That’s the guy who wants me dead,” she said, “Where’s your wound? Here. Wrap this around it.”

There was another pause.

“Thank you,” the nice Murdock said. Thereby proving once more that he was the only decent Murdock. He took the bandage and she heard a slightly shuddery breath as he secured it around wherever it was that he was bleeding. He breathed through his teeth a few times. “Why’s he want you dead?”

“Mostly because he’s a psychopath,” she said.

“Oh, good thing he’s here then. He and Octo-lady can be best friends.”

Mmmmm, they’d see about that.

“Gwen.”

She nearly died.

“Oh hey, Red, what’s up?” the nice Murdock said. “Thought you got tanked there for a second.”

“Who the fuck is that guy?” The dog Murdock asked.

“This gal’s mortal enemy,” Nice Murdock answered for her. His voice was a bit higher than his older counterpart’s. Just a little. Mostly, his accent wasn’t as strong.

“Mortal? Enemy? At your age? Damn girl, good job. I didn’t have any moral enemies until I was like, 25.”

“You lying sack of shit, if there is a Marci in your verse, she is and has been your mortal enemy since you were 23.”

Gwen did not know what exactly was happening here, but what she was now uncomfortably aware of was the fact that she was in a warehouse with three Matt Murdocks, each representing different extreme squares on an alignment chart, and a furious Doc Ock. And most importantly, her friends were nowhere to be found.

“Kid you need to chill the fuck out, Marci is not your mortal enemy. Frank Castle is your mortal enemy. You met Frank yet? He’ll be right under Fisk.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

“Do either of you know where Miles and Peter are?” she asked.

“Where are you?” Doc Ock sang ominously somewhere down on the floor level.

“Hey, kid. You still got that blade?” Dog Murdock asked even quieter than before.

“No, gal broke it in _half_ , you know what I went through to get that thing?”

“Elektra?”

“Damn, you’re good. Hey, is it the dog that does it?”

These two were…maybe exactly what Gwen needed right now.

“Miles and Peter,” she said. “Where are they?”

“In the box,” the nice Murdock responded immediately. “But she’s guarding it. And her arm things are very strong. Much stronger than they seem.”

What box?

“The box. The one down there,” he said.

Gwen then realized she was asking not one, but two blind men to describe an object none of the three of them could see. She backtracked.

“What happened to them?”

“Some kind of syringe. Poison, I dunno. Smells bad. Shot it out of a gun. Think she nabbed Peter while he was in the box. She put them both inside.”

“And you let her?” Gwen asked.

“Define ‘let,’” Dog Murdock said.

Oh, okay. Slightly more comforting.

“Are you guys okay?” she asked.

“Define ‘okay,’” the nice Murdock said.

Actually, she took it back. They were kind of great together.

“The guy who I brought here is my Matt Murdock,” she whispered.  “He’s hiding somewhere, but he wants to kill me.”

There were two teeny, extremely validating gasps in response to this.

“We can’t let him kill you,” Nice Murdock said.

“We won’t let him kill you,” Dog Murdock amended.

“No, don’t worry about that. What we need though is for him to get mad at Doc Ock,” Gwen said. “I thought he’d be pissed and follow me straight through to her, but he’s vanished. I don’t—”

“He’s not vanished, he’s right there,” Nice Murdock said and then made a soft choked noise when Dog Murdock punched him and hissed,

“She can’t see, you idiot.”

“But he’s—I can smell him. God, _why_.”

“I dunno, maybe his sense of smell is fucked.”

“Maybe he doesn’t have one.”

As much as Gwen legitimately loved this beautiful snark being directed at her own personal leech/tick mongrel, she really needed these two to focus.

“How do we make him hate Doc Ock?” she asked. “In like, five seconds.”

There was a thoughtful pause in the dark.

“Oh, I’ve got it,” Dog Murdock said.

 

 

Gwen did not understand what was happening, all she knew was that Dog Murdock was gleeful about this whole plan of his and it involved, to her surprise, finding the damn light switch.

“Why?” she whispered.

“You’ll see.”

He scrabbled off with what Gwen now understood to be a set of broken ribs, while the other Murdock told him to be careful and got hissed at.

“He’s super grumpy,” he confided in Gwen. “I hope I don’t get grumpy if I get as old as him.”

Gwen didn’t really know what to say. For Miles’s sake, she hoped he didn’t either.

Then, clear as day, the lights flicked on. The whole place shuddered a little and flickered and then the world went from black to gray. The warehouse was a tangled mess, a jumble of metal since the last time Gwen had seen it. Obviously, she and the others had caused some damage here.

Standing way down in the middle of the cavern, however, was Murderdock with his blade drawn, moving his head like a snake around Doc Ock’s whole deal. His face snapped up to Gwen sitting with the nice Matt who was, Gwen now saw when she glanced over, a brunet. No red for him. She almost gasped. At that and also because he had a fucking hole right over his hip that wasn’t sluggishly bleeding at all. He couldn’t move. That hadn’t been an option for him.

Murderdock snarled and jerked towards them, having apparently worked his way through all the other new sounds and smells going on in the warehouse. He lunged and was immediately caught by one of Doc Ock’s tentacles. She laughed wildly as she smashed him into the ground over and over and then held him up to eyelevel.

Gwen covered her mouth in horror.

“And here I thought you were done. Daredevil they call you, more like--” Doc Ock said, then paused as she realized that he was not, in fact, the Daredevil in black she’d been beating the shit out of before. He was, in fact, far more armed than that one.

And now, he was far, far more angry.

“That’s your cue, honey,” the nice Matt said.

Ah.

“I’ll come back for you,” she promised.

He smiled and there was blood in his teeth.

“Get Miles,” he said.

Oh god.

“I’ll come back for you,” she promised again.

 

 

Hell hath no fury like Matt Murderdock scorned and he laid into Doc Ock with single-minded rage and Gwen had never been so thankful for his dedication. She dropped from the metal ledge and landed, thankfully, nearly on top of the lab.

Doc Ock noticed her and screamed out, but she needed all her tentacles to control the beast. He’d worked his way soundly through two of her tentacles already and seemed dead intent on getting her on her back on the floor.

Gwen went inside and got to work. Miles had been stuffed into a new glass box set perpendicular to Peter’s on the opposite lab wall. She’d already played this song and dance. She shattered the glass for Miles. He didn’t move. She shattered the glass for Peter. He didn’t either. Both laid still and silent like they were asleep.

Dead weight. They’d be dead weight.

Peter had been hard enough to get out of his box with both her and Miles; Gwen didn’t know how she was going to get them both out—except wait. Yeah, she did. They’d gotten Peter B. to do it last time. She just needed another Peter.

“NOIR,” she screamed slapping her hands against the air. “I need you, NOW.”

And lo and behold. Sometimes, Peter Parker was reliable.

Noir didn’t ask questions. He had very obviously just come in from a hard night out, given the uh…mysterious substance on his clothes, and Gwen owed him two thousand favors or egg creams or whatever the fuck he wanted for answering back so fast and addressing the situation with the due level of sensitivity.

Mostly.

He threw poor Peter over his shoulder like he was a sack of flour and told her to get Miles. She scooped him out of the glass and by the time she looked up, Noir had already formulated an evacuation plan.

It was his secret extra super power. Either that or a terrifying learned behavior. Either way, regardless of where he was in the world, Noir’s ultimate goal was to identify the nearest exit ASAP. And he was great at it.

It was, and Gwen was not exaggerating here, the most useful skill of his whole Spidey set. She didn’t have to think. She just had to follow. Noir picked his way through rubble like a man who professionally sifted through people’s trash. He gave the battle between Doc Ock and Murderdock an appreciative glance, then hurried along  on his way to his favorite place in every universe, the exit.

He slammed a foot through the broken boards without a care in the world for himself or Peter and performed his next amazing trick of finding Peters before they found him. He dumped Peter into Peter B.’s arms and was off again before he could even finish his startled yelp.

“Thank you,” Gwen called after him and got a silent thumb’s up as he went back into the building.

The others stared at her in shock. It looked like a good majority of the cronies had been taken care of by that point.

“He’s really good at finding things,” she said.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> headcanon: Noir is everyone's most dependable friend, he just doesn't know he's that friend since he considers everything he does for people as just the thing which anyone would do. So he wanders around like a lonely ghost going 'I am so lonely, dark, and mysterious. I will die romantically from consumption any day now. Two people will attend my funeral.' and then when people are like, 'yo, Noir. What's up man? you're such a good guy. I love you, you know that?' he short circuits. 
> 
> anyways i rewrote this twice and am stoked for the next one
> 
> Now with art: https://deniigi.tumblr.com/post/185813635852/


	10. academic integrity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The sound of metal caving in was deafening; it always was.

Gwen dumped Miles into Tats Spidey’s capable arms, then chased Noir back into the building, amid a chorus of calls for her to wait.

“Wade, go with her!” Tats Spidey barked somewhere behind her.

She entered the building again and crashed right into Noir’s back. He surveyed the whole warehouse slowly. Head moving left to right methodically. The noise had died off. No one screaming, no one shouting. No screeching metal anymore.

“Where were the others?” he asked.

The nice Murdock was clear across the warehouse up high, Gwen remembered. She couldn’t quite see him now even with the place illuminated. He.

Dread twisted her guts.

He may have laid down. Fallen asleep. Bled out.

Where was dog Murdock?

They approached the drop-off, the edge of the maze of metal and piping, and peeked over the edge carefully.

Murderdock’s black suit was down there, pinning Doc Ock down to the floor with his knees. He seemed to have done away with all the tentacles. Evidently, he’d gotten all up in her face, gloating about it.

“We can’t let him kill her,” Gwen whispered. Noir gave her wide, alarmed eyes, and then slowly and meaningfully took his hand out of his pocket.

“That’s my plan out, then,” he said. “Any idea—”

The pop of a bullet made both of them jerk in shock. They looked over their shoulders and saw Deadpool standing there with a pistol pointed at the opposite side of the warehouse. He noticed them and shrugged.

“Well, someone had to do it,” he said.

Gwen ground her teeth together and when she looked out over the drop back to Murderdock and Doc Ock she was not unsurprised to see that Murderdock had vanished.

_Shit._

“He’s headed this way,” she said, “We need to move.”

“Nah, y’all are gonna move,” Deadpool said.

“He’ll kill you, DP, you need to _move_.”

“Mmmmm, we’ll see about that. Go on, target is recovering at your 11 and attempting to make a speedy escape.”

And sure enough, Doc Ock had managed to get to her feet and appeared to be limping towards one of the side walls. Gwen threw out a line of web and Noir threw one out with her. He didn’t follow her when she swung wide, though, he went the opposite way. Towards where the nice Murdock was, thank god.

 

 

Gwen hit the ground hard enough that she felt the shock in her knees and she gunned it after Ock. Ock looked over her shoulder and then frantically kicked up the speed. She was running towards a door—an elevator looking thing. She crashed into it and threw in a code in the little reader adjacent and the door opened and—

Not today, motherfucker.

Just as Ock scrambled through the widening double doors, Gwen sprayed a line of webbing to jam them, but Ock somehow predicted this and tossed out her hand to catch the worst of it, then drew the whole thing into the elevator with her.

Fuck.

The doors started to close.

_No._

Two bounds. That was all it would take.

Gwen put more knee into her sprint and hit the first jump. She pulled back her arm.

Second jump.

Her knuckles connected.

 

 

The sound of metal caving in was deafening; it always was. The ring of a smashed dumpster echoed for blocks in the city and so did the rending of crushed steel throughout the warehouse.

But it was too late.

It hadn’t been an elevator. It had been one of those little chambers; a security room with doors and each side. Ock hadn’t had to wait long after the first doors closed. She had the code to open the second set and make a break for it. Gwen had to tear through those and by the time she came out on the other side, she found herself in a car garage. Empty but for the screeching of tires.

One of Fisk’s men, probably, had been waiting for her.

God _damnit_.

The disappointment and frustration sat high in her chest, crammed in there next to the urge to give chase, but she had to go back in.

She’d made a promise.

 

 

No one was in the warehouse when she returned. No Noir; no Murderdock, no Wade. She walked into the middle of the cavern with the smears of blood on the ground a few yards away. The overwhelming silence and the lack of anyone, anything in her hands made her throat ache and her lungs burn.

Failure was unacceptable.

Miles and Peter were stuck in the In-Between.

The nice Murdock was dying. Dog Murdock was wounded. Murderdock was probably running rampant now, in this verse.

Failure was bitter and suffocating.

“Gwen.”

She’d been too late. Too slow. Always too slow.

“Gwen, come here.”

She couldn’t.

“It’s okay, honey. It’s okay, come here.”

She’d really fucked it up this time. She didn’t deserve Peter B.’s arms or sympathy or his calm fucking heartbeat. She’d fucked it all up and people were dying.

Peter B. sighed.

“Someone’s always dying. And no, it’s not your fault. Come on. Let’s go back, we need to regroup.”

There wasn’t anything else to do but follow his directions at this point, so she went. With her head bent low.

 

 

They didn’t go back to Peter B.’s verse; they went back to Tats Spidey’s and when they got there, most of the team was missing. Bitsy Miles was the one who reached back to them and he took them back to Tats Spidey’s apartment where he said the guy would be back soon. He told Gwen it wasn’t her fault. The words in Miles’s voice made her feel worse. He left and she and Peter B. waited for Tats in his cold apartment.

There was a post-it note on top of the others on the fridge with a date written on it in the corner. It was from two days ago; from someone named Ned.

It read, “I love you anyways. Don’t forget to eat today.”  

Ned left a lot of notes that Tats kept on his fridge.

When he finally got back after two hours or so, Tats seemed years older. Tired. He looked up into Peter B.’s eyes and said firmly, “They’re back with Banner. He’s going to keep them safe for now and get them to the point of waking up again. There’s nothing we can do at the minute. We’ve just got to wait until they stabilize again.”

He sighed and sat down heavily on the floor in front of his couch. His knuckles flexed and unflexed in unspoken fury.

Peter B. waited a moment, then went and knelt down next to him; he touched his shoulder and Tats shook his head as though answering a question that hadn’t been spoken.

“Is Mr. Murdock—Matt—is he okay?” Gwen choked out.

Tats Spidey and Peter B. looked at her sadly at the same time.

“We don’t know yet,” Tats Spidey said. “We’ve just got to wait. I got him to friends, though. They’ll look after him until we find and crush this asshole.”

Peter B. sighed.

“We’re not finding or crushing anyone tonight,” he said. “Everyone’s too tired. It’ll only get sloppier from here if we keep this up. Let’s go home for a bit. Clean up. Refuel. We’ll meet back here in say, twelve hours?”

Tats Spidey agreed quietly, though reluctantly. He was still pissed.  But then he sucked it up and asked if they could make it twenty-four to give Miles and Peter as much time to settle down as possible.

Twenty-four hours, Gwen was supposed to wait before finding out if her slowness had killed her friends. Yeah, she could wait twenty-four hours. It was only one day, wasn’t it?

They could hold on for one day; they were strong people, all of them.

Right?

 

 

She turned on the shower to maximum heat and pressure when she got home and only cried for maybe twenty minutes in there before trying to sleep.

 

 

Twenty-four hours felt like an eternity when each second could be someone in your heart’s last. She timed her call to the second. She reached out to Peter B. first and found him looking somewhat better. Shaved and showered at least. He didn’t bother with the suit, this time. Just stepped into her verse in a hoodie and sweats. They matched, almost.

When they reached out to Tats, they found that he too, owned and was wearing a hoodie, although his was black had the word “Cornell” plastered over his chest in red and white block letters. The sleeves were too long; they drooped past his fingers.

“Oh, dope. We all got the same fashion sense,” he said without humor.

He stepped aside to reveal the Spideys of his team, all engaged in an intense competition of who was the most exhausted. Bitsy Miles’s sweatshirt was a faded version of the Visions Academy sweatshirt Gwen had nicked in her original pursual of Miles. He’d draped himself over the arm of the couch and was apparently down for the count. Little Spidey wore an enormous PINK sweatshirt and grey leggings; she didn’t lift her head from the table when Gwen and Peter B. came in. Louis, in his gray Howard University zip-up, surreptitiously checked her pulse on the wrist not wrapped in a black brace. He gave them a little wave when they entered and, apparently satisfied with Little Spidey’s continued existence, carried on typing on his phone.

Tats Spidey refused to let anyone say anything until they were holding tea. In the meantime, he gathered Bitsy Miles up carefully from the couch arm and transferred him to the loveseat so that there was more sitting room. He ran into some trouble because Bitsy Miles was something of a clinger in his sleep. He wrapped his arms around Tats’s neck and nuzzled in there happily. Peter B. had to intervene to facilitate the removal process.

Gwen felt sick seeing watching them.

Bitsy Miles was fine; he was tired. He had a cut across the top of his brow and a swollen jaw. But he was okay.

Her Miles? Well, they still didn’t know.

Once tea had been consumed and all Spiderpeople reawakened, Tats announced that he’d just gotten word from the Daredevil crew that they were all in the clear.

Finally.

The relief from that, at least, made Gwen’s heart a little lighter.

“Fogs says that everyone is highly medicated and chilled the fuck out and ready for a chat if that’s what we want to do,” Tats Spidey read out from his phone.

Yeah. That’s what they wanted to do.

 

 

They met Dave, and his tightly wrapped arm, in Hell’s Kitchen. He had his kid with him. She had huge eyes, which she kept trained on her dad’s arm and his face and, Gwen learned through whispers, she was being unusually well behaved.

Gwen knew what that felt like. Worry was a heavy thing to carry at that age; especially when there was no guarantee that Dad would come home after this kind of thing.

Dave said that he was just checking in; he’d visited the Murdocks and confirmed that they were alive. He warned them all to try to be quiet at least when they said hey and then pointed them in the right direction before taking off back home a few blocks up.

“Is Wade okay?” Gwen asked Tats while they wound their way to where the Murdocks were staying with a friend of theirs.

Tats Spidey raised an eyebrow at her.

“Yeah, he’s fine. He had another job he had to do.”

Another job? After that shitshow?

“Wade’s a secret workaholic, but don’t tell him I told you that.”

“So he’s not dead? He’s not hurt?”

She received incredulous looks all around.

“Wade’s mutation makes him immortal,” Tats explained, “He heals faster than even me sometimes.”

Oh, no shit? Gwen wondered if the DP in her verse was the same.

 

 

They were greeted at the door by the woman who owned the apartment, Karen Page, an unbelievably attractive woman with a hand on her hip and propensity for teasing Tats Spidey. They were then greeted by a dog who thought they were all demons straight from Hell.

“Haze, no,” Karen said. Haze started barking at her instead. Karen growled back through her teeth and then called, “Fogs, deal with your daughter.”

“Matthew, call your child,” Mr. Nelson’s voice instructed from another room.

“Hazel, _no_ ,” Mr. Murdock’s exasperated voice said. He sounded muffled. The dog would not be deterred. Tats Spidey tried to soothe her but with no luck.

“HAZE,” Mr. Murdock snapped at full voice.

She shut up immediately and whimpered, looking back in that direction, then back at the intruders mournfully. She abandoned them to trip Karen on her way back into the other room. Karen clawed her fingers after her.

Tats Spidey snickered.

“She’s a bad girl,” he said.

“The _worst_ ,” Karen agreed.

Karen fawned over how tall Peter B. was while the rest of them tried to contain their reactions to the sight of Karen’s living-room-cum-sick-room. Mr. Murdock, shirtless, scarred, and scandalously fit despite his age, had curled himself protectively around the younger, darker-haired Murdock who laid under his arm quiet and still and pale as a sheet. He shivered a little in his sleep. Between the two of them, they almost had one functional, non-damaged body.

Hazel tried to squirm under Mr. Murdock’s arm to get between him and Matt and in doing so, set off a flurry of sneezing, coughing, and groaning.

Mr. Murdock blearily shoved her away, telling her, “No. Go bother Papa.”

Papa, AKA Mr. Nelson, was nowhere to be seen. Hazel, therefore, refused to budge. She laid down between both Murdocks and wagged her spry plume before resting her chin on Matt’s face. He made a soft noise of disgust and tried to turn over without much success.

“Why’s ya got so many dogs?” he slurred.

“Don’t be talkin’ shit ‘bout my babies,” Mr. Murdock grumbled back.

“Baby needsa _bath_.”

“You two got tha’ in common.”

They were a mess. Tats Spidey squatted down to poke at his Murdock’s ribs and got his shin smacked for it before getting waved off instead upon the guy recognizing him.

“Glad you’re not dead, Double D,” he said. “Where’s the problem child?”

“She’s right fuckin’ here.” Mr. Murdock gestured vaguely at the dog.

“The other problem child,” Tats Spidey asked.

“Other? Oh, him. Hey Kare? The fuck is my husband?”

Kare leaned a hip on her doorway and cocked an eyebrow up with it.

“Dealing with the problem child,” she said.

“Tell ‘im I’m jealous.”

She snorted.

“When are you not jealous?”

“’Scuse you? I’m not jealous like. Most? Half? I dunno, _much_ of the time.”

“Uh-huh, go back to sleep, gorgeous,” Kare said.

Mr. Murdock snickered and jostled Matt.

“You hear that? She still thinks I’m handsome as fuck.”

“S’alright, just ‘cause you got sight don’t mean you got taste,” Matt mumbled. Mr. Murdock thought that was funny as hell and had to clutch at his ribs while he laughed.

Somehow, the two of them taking the mick out of each other made Gwen feel eons better. Her cheeks hurt a little with her grin and then she felt bad because Miles and Peter were still stuck in the deep end. Peter B. nudged her and gave her a knowing look. She didn’t know what he was trying to tell her. Then Tats Spidey stood and stared directly at her.

“ _Your_ Murdock is a spectacular asshole,” he announced. The other two Murdocks gave a cheer of ‘hear, hear” in agreement. The dog was confused and started licking Matt’s ear and he swore.

“He’s here?” Gwen asked; she could practically feel the second her heart sped up.

“The problem child,” Karen emphasized. They all followed her finger to a light green door across the hall. Peter B. looked back at her with the corner of his lip twitching.

“Is that a bathroom?” he said.

“We’re calling it Time Out, but yeah. Bathroom works, too,”  Karen said sagely.

What the fuck did that even mean?

 

 

What it meant was that somehow, these crazy assholes had wrestled Murderdock off the scene in the warehouse. Wade had allegedly done the heavy lifting here, which Gwen could not make her brain understand, even though everyone on Team Red accepted this easily. They responded to her repeated ‘but how?’s with vague hand gestures appearing to suggest that the guy had been given a love tap and sat on until he stopped screaming.

Tats Spidey finally told her that screaming-violent-fuckhead type behavior had been run of the mill, early-thirties Red behavior, and between him and Wade, they’d more or less developed a tried and true set of methods of dealing with it.

“He doesn’t like to be sat on,” he told Gwen like this was some kind of secret family recipe.

Gwen didn’t need to know this because she never, in her life, anticipated every having the chance to put it into practice.

“Wade made him take a nap and he calmed down a lot after that,” Little Spidey interjected helpfully.

Gwen examined the body stretched out before her. She’d never seen Murderdock even close to relaxed before. He didn’t seem to be sleeping, but he also didn’t respond to being talked about, like. At all. And his Time Out companion, Mr. Nelson, stared up at them patiently as though he did not have a serial killer splayed out across his lap.

Gwen was in awe of his bravery.

He had a novel in one hand and petted Murderdock’s thick hair with the other.

Like he was a cat.

“This one’s got a lot of problems,” he diagnosed. Gwen finally realized that that lump of blond over there in the corner was not in fact, a towel; it was Tues with her head laid heavily on top of one of Murderdock’s knees. He did nothing to dislodge her. She was kind of scared he was slipping under; dying slowly.

“Fogs, don’t fall in love with him,” Mr. Murdock ordered from the other room. “I’m still prettier.”

Mr. Nelson hummed thoughtfully and settled in with his back against the sink cabinet for some more petting and a highly noticeable lack of murder, death, or torment around him.

Gwen was going to have a stroke.

“You guys broke him,” she whispered.

“No,” Karen assured her, “Just gave him Matt’s Monday dose; he skipped it anyways.”

What the fuck did that even mean?

“Means your Matty needs an anti-depressant, an anti-anxiety tablet, an aspirin, and some serious one-on-one therapy in order to rejoin society as a functioning human,” Mr. Nelson said.

That was. Uh. A lot. Gwen didn’t know what to do with this information.

“Don’t worry, honey. The end all be all is that we got him stable. He likes Fogs and he likes Tues and the meds got him mostly even, so he’s not much of a threat right now,” Karen summarized.

Murderdock didn’t like anybody. Or anything. He wasn’t allowed to. Gwen couldn’t conceptualize him with—

Hold up.

“He likes you?” she asked Mr. Nelson. He gave her a curious expression and stopped petting. Murderdock’s eyes flickered and his arm jerked around as though to shove himself off the floor. Mr. Nelson sunk his fingers back into his hair and, like magic, the arm’s tension released and its elbow dropped. So did Murderdock’s eyes.

Way, way relaxed.

“I’m going to go with ‘yes,’ your honor,” Mr. Nelson said.

Gwen’s whole chest went from cold to bubbly and giddy and she had the jitters all of a sudden.

“He likes you,” she said. “ _You_.”

“Yes, that’s what I said.”

“Oh my god, no. You don’t understand—he likes _you._ ”

Mr. Nelson looked over to Tats Spidey for more information, but he could only shrug. He looked back at Gwen.

“Matt’s my partner, Gwen. My husband for the last, what, going on nine? Ten? Years now. Of course he likes me. I don’t know if there is a universe where we wouldn’t be together; right Matty?”

There was a sneeze from the living room followed by a choke of pain and hushed murmuring. Eventually Mr. Murdock threw a ‘fucking _duh_ ,’ in their direction.

No, but they didn’t understand.

“Mr. Nelson, I told you. You’re the DA in my verse,” she tried to explain. “Him—he’s the kingpin. I work with you a lot; like. Trying to protect you from him, sometimes. But if he likes you, then maybe he likes. Maybe he likes my Mr. Nelson, too?”

“I dunno, let ‘em at each other and see what happens,” Mr. Nelson said offhandedly. “Actually, you probably don’t want to see what happens.”

“Gonna fuck,” Mr. Murdock illuminated helpfully from the other room. Matt made a scandalized noise and told him not to speak ill of his best friend. “Don’t worry, you two’re gonna fuck, too,” Mr. Murdock promised him.

“Don’t jinx it, you heathen,” Matt hissed. “Think of the HR violations.”

“The good thing about owning your own practice, is that you get to write those things,” Mr. Murdock said.

“That’s malpractice.”

“No, that’s just being practical.”

“Malpractice. You’re a disgrace to the legal profession.”

Peter B. suddenly stood up straight. He left the rest of them to go stand over the decent Murdocks in the living room.

“Say that again,” he said.

Gwen could just see over her shoulder the two laying on the floor become suspicious as hell. They kind of pressed closer together around the dog.  

“Mal…practice?” Matt offered nervously.

Peter B. stared emptily at him. Then his head snapped over to the rest of them.

“I have an idea.”

 

 

Miles woke up and felt like he was dying for a second, only to realize he was laying on the floor of Tats Spidey’s apartment with his own face directly over him.

He screamed.

Bitsy screamed.

And then people were rapidly all around him, fussing over him like no one’s business. He felt like he couldn’t get enough air in his chest. His whole body felt heavy and then flooded with relief.

Only part of that came from having finally escaped Peter’s endless recitation of dad jokes.

He could just about cry.

Gwen cried for him instead. She almost crushed him with the strength of her hug. She kept apologizing for some reason and it took Peter B. to get her to let go and explain to Miles what exactly was going on around him.

It looked like a veritable sea of paperwork.

It hurt his eyes to look at, so he pressed his forehead into Peter B. chest instead. His laugh was low and comforting and he, crucially, did not make any dad jokes.

He was the superior Peter.

Peter B. let him stay there, curled up across his lap, to get his bearings while he read through papers over his head.

“You happen to know if Peter is planning on joining us any time soon?” he asked after a little while. Miles found that light didn’t hurt his eyes anymore and pulled his head out of the safety of Peter B.’s sweatshirt to try to see what he was reading through.

It was a whole lot of text.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Malpractice,” Tats Spidey said firmly, leaned up against the other couch with a red pen stuck in the corner of his mouth.

“Miles, Peter?” Peter B. asked.

Oh, right.

“He’s the _worst_ ,” Miles told him. “He sang the Baby Shark song for a _million years_ , Peter. A million. He kept forgetting where he was and he had to start over every time and now _I’ve_ got the Baby Shark song in my head.”

Tats Spidey choked on the pen.

“I’m keeping him,” he said through peals of laughter. Miles thought that this reaction was not the appropriate one in the face of his pain and suffering. Peter B. snorted and shuffled to the next page in his hands.

“Yeah, he’s the worst, but he’s a techie and we could use his brain any time now,” he said.

Miles felt like he’d fallen asleep during class and had woken up in the last five minutes.

“Why do we need a techie?” he asked. “Did we get Doc Ock?”

Tats Spidey smashed his pen and moaned about it. Someone behind him in the kitchen threw another one at him and missed by a mile.

“Negative, space cadet,” Peter. B. said. Miles squirmed out from under his arm to look around and was stunned to find everyone else—literally everyone else on the team, sitting in various positions of academic contempt, reading through piles of papers like those in Peter B.’s hands.

Tats Spidey had produced a huge whiteboard and leaned it up against his wall. Someone had drawn a line down the center of it and then at the top of each section, drawn an angry octopus with glasses. One in blue and the other in green.

There were scattered notes under each section.

Little Spidey appeared to have melted under the burden of assigned papers. All that was left of her was a defeated arm, bent at the elbow, weakly grasping at two sheets covered in yellow highlight.

Louis stared at the work in front of him like he was staring directly into God’s eyes. Enraptured and unmoving. And the other Miles laid over the back of the loveseat, his head next to Tats Spidey’s.

And then there were all the Murdocks, and ‘all’ was indeed the right descriptor here.

There.

Were?

Three?

Well. There was Matt whose head kept dipping while his fingers traced page after page, and then there was Mr. Murdock laying with his whole weight on top of someone who was actively trying to kill him. Both the two visible Murdocks were heavily bandaged. The skinny Mr. Nelson arrived with a model and they both passed around coffee orders and congratulated Miles on his new lease on consciousness. Then that Nelson shooed Mr. Murdock off his prisoner and told the guy, who leapt up in a fury and made for the door, to sit down, shut up and be good.

Gwen watched with her hands plastered over her face in delight when the guy faltered and slowly, confusedly, followed the directive. Mr. Nelson shoved a pile of text into his lap and told him he was educated, and therefore had a job.

Then he sat down between that guy and his own Murdock on the floor and picked a few pages of his own out of their mutual pile to read.

Miles looked at Peter B. desperately for context.

“Ock got away,” Peter B. said, chewing on a pen cap, “All the DDs took a beating save Mr. Grumpypants over there who did some beating of his own—way to go, by the way, man, you really helped us out back there—and seeing as this is the second of our offensive plans which has failed, we decided that we’re gonna try a new tactic.”

The angry Murdock made a sound like he was dying and tried to escape again. He got to the door and went stiff like a cat because, at the same moment, it opened on its own.

Wade didn’t wear his mask this time.

He was pretty scary—with and without it; but he had a stunning smile under all that gnarled skin. That angry Murdock carefully edged away from him and settled back down, nervously, next to Mr. Nelson.

“Which is?” Miles asked, watching Wade sit down happily next to Red. The angry Murdock kind of squirmed a little further away from both of them. Mr. Nelson patted at his arm and put his assigned papers back into his lap.

“Which is that we are thinking smarter not harder. She wants to fuck with us, that’s fine. We’ll just ruin her career,” Peter B. said.

Wait.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

Miles was missing something here.

“We’re doing what now?” he repeated.

There was a cry from the bedroom and Tats Spidey lit up like a Christmas tree.

“He’s back!” he cried. He dumped everything in his lap into a pile and was off like a shot into his bedroom. They all knew Peter was awake because they heard him say “oof!” and “Not this again.”

“Our techie has returned to us from beyond the grave,” Tats Spidey announced to the room shortly thereafter with a dazed Peter balanced on his shoulder.

“Tech..ie?” Peter repeated, flinching at the light.

“You ever published in a journal?” Tats Spidey asked relentlessly.

Peter stared at him. Then stared at everyone else in the room.

“Why is everyone looking at me?” he asked.

“Hey, hey, focus,” Tats Spidey said, “Journal. You. Published?”

Peter blinked at him.

“Uh, yeah. I guess. Co-authored a bit with my supervisor for a piece two years ago—why?”

Tats stared soulfully.

“What journal?” he asked.

Peter rubbed at his eyes, trying to keep up.

“Uh, _Nature_ , I think. Or was that the one we got rejected from? I dunno, there were a lot. I taped all the rejections to the inside of the cabinets—why?”

“Because we need you, you precious ray of academic sunshine and tech support, to do help us do a little bit of academic finagling,” Tats Spidey said.

Miles pinched himself to make sure he wasn’t still dreaming. He wasn’t.  

“For an academic journal?” Peter clarified.

“Yes.”

“For what? I’m a biologist, I don’t—”

Tats Spidey’s undivided attention was entering ‘eerie’ territory. He hadn’t blinked in too long there.

“You’re a biologist,” he said.

“I—uh. Yeah. Chemistry. Biology. Kind of my thing,” Peter said nervously.

“I’m an engineer,” Tats Spidey told him.

“Oh, okay. That’s cool. Is that what we’re, uh, reading?”

Silence.

Tats Spidey jabbed a finger at the whiteboard and said, “You see that shit?”

Peter saw it. He was too terrified to say he hadn’t now, just as Miles was.

“Blue Ock is my Ock. He published all this shit; and I mean it’s absolute _shit_. Look at it. Failed to complete ethics board certification. Failed to record results in an accessible database. Failed to pass notes and all other records onto the funding body. And most importantly, results are on too small of a sample size to make any justifiable conclusions—BUT, this motherfucker got this shit published in _Physics_ , which is some next level horseshit.”

Miles wasn’t sure he was following here. He tried to find Gwen for clarification but she didn’t meet his eye.

“Your Ock is in green,” Tats Spidey continued, “And she is a biologist, which I am but a shell of, but that’s not important. What’s important is that she, unfortunately, does follow procedure and best practice, etc. etc. EXCEPT. These two are the same horrible people, so they’ve got to have something in common here, we just need to find it.”

“And we’re finding that because?” Peter asked.

“Because we’re gonna sue her for malpractice,” Matt said simply.

Wait a second here.

“We’re suing Doc Ock?” Miles clarified.

“She only gets Fisk’s support because she’s got the name and status to keep his focus,” Peter B. said. “And then she gets away with all these shit because she’s the head honcho at her institute. She gets caught for plagiarism or academic dishonesty, and well. That’s enough to bring her back down to normal-people level. She won’t have access to the resources to keep ruining all our lives on the current scale she is.”

That was.

Remarkably sound.

“We don’t _have_ to sue her,” Mr. Murdock clarified, “We just need to lodge a formal complaint. Need evidence to do that, though.”

“But how do you know she’s plagiarized or done this malpractice thing?” Miles asked.

Peter kind of winced. Tats Spidey waved it off like it was nothing.

“Dude, you have no idea how common this kind of shit is,” he said, “Something like 1 in 10 researchers at this level engage in some kind of plagiarism or falsification. Mr. Stark caught shit for it a few years back and now we have a fucking ‘show your work’ policy for everything in the lab. He even made us these special tablets for note taking and if he catches you without yours there’s hell to pay.”

“Good,” Mr. Murdock said.

Tats Spidey rounded on him.

“You’re cramping my style, old man,” he said. “Impinging on my academic freedom and creativity.”

“Peter, you _are_ the tablet patrol in your labs.”

“Doesn’t make it any less dumb as fuck.”

“Oh, be careful, what if Mr. Stark hears you?”

There was a long, tense pause.

“I’m not scared of him.”

“Lie.”

“I’m _not_.”

“Anyways,” Peter B. interrupted, “Basically, those two are the same people so whatever the Doc Ock here got knocked on, chances are the Doc Ock in your verse ran into a similar choice. We just have to figure out which one it was she slipped up on, which means, unfortunately, we’ve got to go through her work with a fine-toothed comb looking for any of those things which are suspicious.”

Miles saw now that someone had set off a part of the white board at the bottom and scrawled inside it a list of things to look for including, “iffy citations,” “weird sample sizes,” “Numbers that do not add up to given values,” “percentages which do not add up to 100%,” “cure-all claims,” “any type of ‘cure’ or ‘solution’ language whatsoever,” “Noted lack of hedging words—i.e. may, might, could.”

“That’s…ambitious,” Peter said. He almost sounded impressed.  “I mean, unless you have a background in biology or stats, you wouldn’t necessarily—” he trailed off in the face of Tats Spidey’s intent expression.

Tats pointed at Mr. Murdock who did not acknowledge the finger.

“Valedictorian, Summa cum Laude, Columbia University,” he said. He moved onto Mr. Nelson. “Class VP, Summa cum Laude, Columbia University.” He pointed at Matt who snapped awake and looked around to figure out what was happening. “Alumni of?” Tats Spidey started.

“Oh,” Matt said. “Columbia.”

“Grade point average?”

“Uh, 3.95.”

Tats Spidey directed the finger at the hateful Mr. Murdock who grimaced at it.

“You’re a lawyer,” he said, “And a kingpin. You do stats in school?”

“No—”

“Yeah,” both the other Murdocks confirmed.

“Thank you. Me? Cornell grad, Masters. You?”

“Uh,” Peter said reluctantly, “NYU?”

“Wade’s ex-special forces. Bitsy is a baby genius, Louis went to Howard, Miles is probably also a baby genius, Gwen’s brilliant,—what I’m trying to say here is that we have a room full of fucking smart people. With the exception of Little Spidey, who we all know and love anyways--we can do this.”

“HEY.”

“I just said we know and love you, girl, it’s fine you can be dumb as fuck. We need some of them in the world, too.”

“Says the guy who walked in wet cement last week.”

“WE SAID WE WOULDN’T SPEAK OF IT.”

Peter B. hid his smirk with his hand and gave Miles a wink.

“I got a feeling this one’s gonna stick,” he said.  

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if anyone's wondering where Noir went: he popped in to grab Matt and then popped back out after everyone was safe. Man already came from his own job; he wanted some damn shuteye. 
> 
> Also, for anyone interested, academic dishonesty among researchers is actually believed to be around this ballpark (1 out of 10) up at the professional levels, especially in fields requiring substantial data production and recording. This figure comes from a series of 19 studies put together, some of which I had to read through as part of my doctoral training. 
> 
> Unfortunately, these studies were based off self-reported instances of academic dishonesty, though, which means the figures are actually probably much higher. So as much as I wish I could say this is a cute little idea I came up with on my own, it is entirely based in reality. 
> 
> So the moral of the story is: don't plagiarize, kids! It is bad for knowledge production and can actually ruin your academic and professional career!


	11. six and stones

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Once is an accident, twice is a proofreading error, three times is a pattern, but six is fucking malpractice,” Tats Spidey told him and Bitsy sagely.

Six didn’t seem like a very large number to Miles, but apparently six was a very important number among science-y people like Doc Ock and Peter and Tats Spidey.

“Once is an accident, twice is a proofreading error, three times is a pattern, but _six_ is fucking malpractice,” Tats Spidey told him and Bitsy sagely while the many lawyers in the room put their heads together to figure out how to write threatening letters to journal editors without including any threatening content. “Six is willful reproduction of results, regardless of their validity and she’s just assumed that these figures are correct and cited herself in every paper. This is academic snobbery at its finest. The least she could do was stick someone else’s study in there next to hers.”

Right, but was forgetting or choosing not to cite one person really enough to get someone in hot water in the field?

Tats Spidey didn’t have a good answer for him, but Peter did. He stopped chewing on the back of a pen and pointed out that maybe it wasn’t a big deal if Ock had published before the other guys in the field, and maybe it wouldn’t be a big deal if the only other person working in the same corner of the field, on the same type of research didn’t have a whole lab under his supervision at Oscorp. But given that she had evidently taken neither of those factors into account, it could be seen as fairly egregious.

“You gotta at least pay lip service,” he said. “That’s just politics.”

“I have a novel idea,” the angry Murdock—Murderdock as Gwen called him or ‘Mads Murdock’ as Peter B. hilariously dubbed him—snapped at his doubles over around the laptop.

“I hate it,” Matt said automatically.

“Go on,” Mr. Murdock said over him.

“Would it not make more sense if this letter went to, I dunno, the offended party?” Murderdock asked. “Would that not put an important, useful, and potentially life-saving degree of separation between us unfortunate souls submitting this letter and the homicidal party in question? Why are _we_ putting our necks on the chopping block here? Why not just feed this shit to Whatshisname Oscorp and let him rain down terror?”

“The result will be the same,” Matt said, wrinkling his nose at Murderdock.

“I am aware of that, _peaches_ , but think of the impact.”

“Oh, do tell, _honey._ ”

Murderdock had taken it upon himself in the last few hours to make a resolute enemy out of Matt. Not Mr. Murdock. Not Wade, or Gwen, or Mr. Nelson, or even any of the Peters.

Matt. And Matt only.

Anytime Matt had thought he’d found something in the paperwork, Murderdock jabbed at him, calling him dumb and somehow spinning a line of reasoning which made his hypothesis seem absolutely outlandish. Even with math. Matt had added up some numbers which didn’t work out, but Murderdock’s derisive huffing had incited him to do it three times over before he decided that no, he was in the right here.

And even then, when he was through and proven right, Murderdock just smirked at him. His teeth were way too white. Like, bleached white.

Miles didn’t like them and Matt couldn’t even see them but knew to dislike them. He edged a little closer to Mr. Murdock who told Murderdock, without lifting his head, that if he wanted to keep all them pearly whites, he better start working and praying.

Murderdock asked him what would happen if he didn’t.

Mr. Murdock asked him to try it and find out.

Gwen said that this was kind of the guy’s MO. He pulled shit, plants, and people, up by the roots, then rattled them until they almost gave way. Not until they did give way, no, that was too easy for him. He wanted to draw the torture out. He liked to take everyone to the very edge and then watch them scramble.

Mr. Murdock seemed immune to this behavior, as did Wade. Little Spidey told them in a whisper that that was because Mr. Murdock was secretly a sexual sadist. Mr. Nelson overheard this and just about died cackling. Mr. Murdock threatened to hang him out the window, too, but the threat was kind of lost in Mr. Nelson cooing at him about what a bad boy he was, with all his puppies and failed flirting with their third firm partner.

“It is not failure until it’s over,” Mr. Murdock finally snipped at him, “And it isn’t over.”

Karen snorted.

“Matt,” she said sympathetically. She didn’t follow it up with anything.

“It’s not.”

“Pal, if she’s in love with anyone, it’s definitely me,” Mr. Nelson told him with a grin. “She learned how to knit for me, Murdock. What’ve you got to top that?”

A pause.

“Hold on, I got a list,” he said, digging out his phone.

Mr. Murdock’s list of proof that his and Mr. Nelson’s third firm partner was in love with him went like:

  1. She loves my dogs
  2. She changed her hand lotion for me
  3. Everyone loves my ass
  4. I made her tea once and forgot the teabag and she lied and said it was great
  5. She throws shit at my head
  6. She calls me an idiot at least twice a day
  7. She hasn’t tried to kill me even once



“Those, Franklin Phillip, are the same symptoms my fucking _husband_ displays in my extremely attractive and charming presence. Therefore, she is in madly love with me and step two is simply getting her to admit it on record. The defense rests. But also, Shithead B here is right; we should blow this shit out of the water. Maximum impact. Get her name in public view. Send a letter to the editors, then send a letter to Whatshisname Oscorp and get him raging on social media. Little Red, apologies, but we’re using your good name for both of these. Who wants to write which?”

Matt was scandalized.

“Why am _I ‘_ Little Red’?” he demanded.

Scandalized for all the wrong reasons.

 

 

Miles had never seen lawyers draft anything before, but he had worked on many group presentations and was validated to see that it went down basically the same way, even at the professional level.

“We are not hinting at bodily harm,” Mr. Nelson groused at Murderdock for the third time.

Murderdock had decided that he wanted to write the editor of the journal. He was overwhelmingly, emphatically not allowed to write to _anyone_. Even if he did have some slightly terrifying tips and tricks about coded language.

Matt reminded him that this shit was going to be in his name and he was not getting arrested because of Murderdock’s lack of humanity. Murderdock told him that if he had a brain in his skull, he already knew plenty of ways to break out of jail.

He didn’t get that this wasn’t the point. Like, truly didn’t get it. Even after both Peter and Gwen took the time to try to break it down for him. The lights were on, but no one was home in that particular part of his brain.

Wade told him that the fastest way out of this argument was to just fake empathy and move on.

Peter B. suddenly wouldn’t let Miles or Gwen within three feet of Wade.

 

 

The letter, once drafted, didn’t sound to Miles to be very threatening.

 _To whom it may concern,_ the first one read.

  _It has been brought to my attention by multiple parties that there is a significant set of errors in one of the articles you have published in Volume 543, No. 7 of your journal. According to these parties, such errors have shown up repeatedly in this author’s work and are chiefly located in Table 9 of her article in the given volume. Please see the attached record for specification. In addition to these errors, it has also been brought to my attention that the author in question has failed to provide adequate citations for other relevant research, specifically that completed by Dr. Herman Andrews, Director Oscorp’s Institute of Infectious Disease, which corresponds to her own._

_As an attorney, I am not in a place to critique these articles for their content, however the reaction that I have perceived from those persons who have contacted me regarding this matter leads me to be concerned that this work is impacting the credibility of your journal. Furthermore, it would appear to me that this type of error violates the terms and conditions of your publication agreement and so action on the part of the editing board is meant to follow._

_Certainly, it is up to the board of editors to decide what action is taken in regards to this issue and the parties who I represent are not yet considering any type of suit against the author or the journal over intellectual property. They have instead reached out to me in order to facilitate a conversation. And as such, I hope that this letter serves to do that._

_Please do let me know if you have any questions or require any greater information which I may be able to provide you._

_-Matthew Murdock_

 

“What’s threatening about this?” Miles asked Gwen when the old people broke off to go edit the hell out of the other letter.

“No, I got this,” Bitsy ducked under his Spidey’s arm to come join them when he turned around to answer. Tats Spidey rolled his eyes and let him go before moving back to the others.

“Louis is teaching me how adults talk in ‘professional settings,’” Bitsy told them, “‘Facilitate a conversation’ means ‘deal with your shit internally or you’re gonna face a law suit.’”

How. How did Louis know that?

“He’s an accountant.”

A what now?

“Miles, we’ve talked about this; I’m not an accountant,” Louis said, coming over to remove his little buddy from the situation. “I’m a project manager, that’s all I do.”

“He’s an accountant.”

“I’m _not._ I work in Public Admin.”

“He helps build affordable housing.”

“I—” Louis stopped. And then sighed. “I mean, yes. Mostly. We _try_ to help build affordable housing. But that’s not the same thing as being an accountant. Money is not my strong suit.”

Bitsy looked up at him scathingly. Louis faltered a little bit.

“Project managing requires some knowledge of finances, but that’s not the same thing as—”

“Anyways, ‘let me know if you have any further questions or concerns,’ means ‘try me, bitch,’” Bitsy told them cheerfully. Murderdock laughed over in the other group. That was as good as proof here.

 

 

The other letter was drafted with far less formality because all it really needed to say was ‘Dude, someone in your field is publishing weird data and failing to cite you. What’s up with that, huh?’ which was allegedly both easier and harder to say in a professional way.

 

 

The letters were finalized (with no thanks to Murderdock who wanted to end all of them now with ‘try me, bitch.’ Bitsy had created a monster. Or rather, awakened a monster.) and submitted and then, somehow, that was it.

They just had to wait. It was all very anti-climactic.

How long did they have to wait?

No one could say. Except, of course Murderdock, who had decided without anyone else’s opinion that lack of response within three days was somehow permission to either bring the suit or start waging holy terror on all parties involved. Miles wasn’t sure he was so much still angry at Doc Ock for trying to break him in half so much as he was just looking to cause some chaos.

Gwen said it was the latter. She swore that he’d just gotten bored with the whole thing by then. She was trying to figure out a way to get him home which did not involve her stabbing him and running. This was a problem because he remained decidedly and doggedly latched onto Matt as his new object of entertainment.

Miles did not want a Murderdock in his verse. Peter did not want a Murderdock in their verse. Matt sure as hell wanted to get as far away from this madman and his many, many teeth as soon as possible.

Mr. Murdock had the perfect solution.

Her name was Hazel. Karen brought her by when she came over to bring Mr. Murdock home.

Murderdock _hated_ Hazel.

“But she loves you,” Mr. Murdock cooed at him upon releasing his wayward daughter into the world by unclicking her leash.

As soon as it came off, Hazel decided that anyone standing within two feet of her owner was her best friend, despite having tried to attack them all the day before. Murderdock hissed. Hazel didn’t seem to hear him. She came up to Gwen to do a happy puppy dance and get pets and, in doing so, got a good smell of Murderdock. She went dead still. He went dead still, too.

Hazel’s plume started wagging.

“I will kill this dog,” Murderdock declared.

“With what?” Mr. Murdock asked. Murderdock sneered at him and went for his side, where he’d kept an honest to god sword for most of the time he’d been there.

But it was gone.

The look on his face when he realized this was priceless.

Wade made a loud pondering noise behind Mr. Murdock.

“Yours is nicer than mine,” he pouted. He had the sword delicately between two hands and appraised it thoughtfully. “Real Japanese steel, man. How’d you swing that one?”

Murderdock’s eye twitched. Gwen took that as her cue.

“Give it here,” Murderdock said, low and dangerous. Wade clicked the blade open with his thumb and made another thinking sound.

“Why don’t we trade? I’ll give you two shitty ones for this nice one and you can double fist ‘em all the way home,” Wade offered.

“You’re not understanding what I’m saying here,” Murderdock said. Mr. Murdock crossed his arms and cocked out a hip. Wade wriggled in delight.

Gwen opened a window while they were locked in this battle of wills and then gave Miles and Peter B. a quick squeeze goodbye. She’d be in touch, she promised. As an afterthought, she gave Tats Spidey a little side squeeze too which he hadn’t been expecting.

When that was all done, she finally made eye contact with Wade over the increasing threats Murderdock was directing at Mr. Murdock’s lax posture.

She put her hand up and curled her fingers a little.

 

 

Not even a second after she caught the blade, she was out the window  and Murderdock was on her heels like white on rice. They were already gone by the time the window started closing of its own accord. No shouting, no threats, just a crazy race through the city.

“Well, ain’t he just a treat?” Wade said.

 

 

They decided to go home again.

Well. Wade told everyone that they were going home again and Mr. Murdock celebrated with him which amounted to the same thing. Their seniority apparently gave them the right to make such decisions for the team. And anyways, they all needed to wait until they heard back from the editor or the director at Oscorp before they knew if everything had worked out. In the meantime, Peter B. said, it wasn’t really safe for Peter go back to his, Matt’s, and Miles’s verse.

He didn’t really seem to safe in this verse either though. While the others had been fussing over word choice, he’d slumped down a bit in the corner of one of Tats Spidey’s sofas and gotten quieter and quieter.

Paler and paler.

He was asleep by the time it was time to go home. Glitching frequently. Miles himself had been more glitchy than usual since waking up from the In Between, but nothing like this. He and Matt had tried keeping a hand touching Peter, hoping that maybe a connection to their verse would ground him, but it was no use. The glitching continued. Peter didn’t wake up.

Miles’s heart spasmed with every flicker.

His mind irrationally decided that if Peter slept for too long, he’d slip back into the In Between. He really liked it there. He liked it there more than he liked anywhere, actually. Had been absurdly cheerful and more awake, although drugged, in the few hours they’d spent there together than he had been in the whole time he’d spent awake with the rest of them in Miles’s verse and in Tats Spidey’s.

Peter B. put a hand on Miles’s shoulder and jolted him out of his own head.

“Tats is going to look after him,” he said. Miles looked at Tats. He was dismissing his team mates, chasing them out the door with the threat that everyone was going to school and work and he’d hear nothing else of it.

Peter B. squeezed Miles’s shoulder.

“He’s been holding it together pretty well so far, but he’s really sick, Miles.”

Yeah, he knew. Somehow, he just knew.

“Do you think he’s gonna die?” he asked softly, even though Peter was well and truly asleep. Holding Matt’s hand back loosely.

Peter B. sighed.

“I don’t know, kid. Me and Tats are gonna take him back to Banner for some monitoring. And. Miles, look at me, buddy.” He did. Peter B.’s eyes looked tired and sad. “At some point we’re gonna have to ask him if he wants to keep doing this or if he wants to go back to how he was.”

Did they really have to do that?

“Yeah, buddy. That’s how this works. It’s his choice.”

No.

It wasn’t though. It just.

It wasn’t.

See, Miles had a feeling about this. When Peter was with him in his verse, it felt complete. That heaviness that came with being in another Spidey’s verse, that glitchy, jittery feeling, yeah. It went way away when he was at home doing normal things, but it had been gone— _gone,_ gone—when Peter came home.

Miles didn’t know how to explain it.

It just.

It felt right.

It wasn’t selfish, he swore it wasn’t. Or maybe it was, but not all the way. Not as much as the words would convey.

Their verse wanted two Spidermen. Just like Tats Spidey’s verse wanted two Spidermen, for example. It wanted two, but it had four. And Miles would bet anything that if he took either this verse’s Peter or its Miles out of it, then it would pull and mourn the loss just like his did for Peter.

He just.

He didn’t know how to explain it.

“Miles, buddy, hey. Don’t be upset.”

He wasn’t upset, he was _frustrated_. They were different. The words never came as quickly as colors, pictures, shapes.

He wanted to say that Peter was cyan and Miles was magenta. And their home was yellow. Could they get by without one of the colors in their ink cartridge set? Yes. Of course, they could. But they wouldn’t get the whole rainbow.

Even blacks and whites wouldn’t be the same without cyan.

“C’mere, kiddo.”

Peter B. was warm and he was better with emotions. He understood Miles better than Peter, even though he and Peter shared a verse. Distantly, Miles thought that maybe their verses were mixed up. Maybe Peter B. was supposed to be cyan.

“What’s going on, tell me what’s going on the best you can, alright?”

He couldn’t. He only had colors.

“What do you mean, colors?”

He tried to explain with the colors. He didn’t know how to else to do it and Peter was an artist like him. He didn’t call it that, but he was a photographer. He spoke in pictures, too. Miles thought that maybe, _maybe_ he would understand. But the look on Peter B.’s face was unreadable when he was done.

He dropped his gaze to the space around his knees and sighed out all the air in his lungs.

“Miles, you’re the Spiderman in your verse,” he said, “You should be proud of that. Look, you’re such a good Spiderman that you went out and saved Spiderman. Yeah, maybe he ain’t in great shape, but you know what? He’s here. And you’ve given him the chance to make a decision, buddy. You went and gave him the choice someone else took away from him. So yeah, maybe it feels better to have him with you in your verse, maybe that feels right, and maybe you and him were originally supposed to be like Tats and Bitsy at some point, but sometimes shit just doesn’t work out, kiddo. That’s what your verse decided needed to happen. It’s already accepted its new Spiderman, and honestly, what it probably wants is his body back, Miles. It doesn’t care what that looks like.”

What a horrible thing to say.

What a horrible, horrible thing to fucking say.

Miles thought Peter B. would understand. His heart felt empty.

He sniffed hard and couldn’t stop the tears. The frustration. He’d always thought frustration filled all the space in his lungs and spilled over, but he didn’t know shit anymore because he had all this space in his chest and all this frustration running down his face of its own accord.

“Oh, Miles.”

He didn’t want a hug.

He didn’t—

“Hey, what’s going on?” a soft voice said over his head. Tats. His apartment was so much quieter, lonely almost, with the others gone.

Peter B. tried to explain. His voice and closeness felt suffocating. Miles had trusted him to say the right thing and he hadn’t.

“Oh, buddy. Oh, Itsy. Come here, honey, this guy’s a mess. Come here.”

Tats Spidey wet a paper towel and made him wipe his face and breathe with him. His eyes were a different kind of brown than Peter B.’s. His hair wasn’t as stiff. He didn’t touch Miles, just waited until he was cried out.

“Miles we’re gonna do everything that we can to help him,” he said—no. Promised. “But we gotta be really, really careful here, do you understand? If Blondie just goes back and says, hey y’all, I’m Peter Parker, never died, ‘sup? Then all that’s going to do is cause chaos for him and for you and for everyone he loves and who loves him, does that make sense? He’d never be able to find a job; his MJ would probably be pissed with him. The whole world would know who he is and what he’s done and that’s all fine and good if you’re dead forever, but that makes things super complicated if you happen to be un-unalived, yeah?”

Miles sniffed.

That. Well. That made more sense. He nodded. Tats Spidey nodded with him.

“So what we’re gonna do is give him the chance to decide if he wants to take that risk, not just for himself, but for all those he loves. We don’t know these folks like he does; he can decide if the benefits outweigh the costs in that area. But in the meantime, buddy. We gotta get him some help. There’s definitely something really wrong with his cells and his consciousness, we’ve all seen him fading in and out. He can’t live a normal life like that, even if he wanted to. So let’s just take this one step at a time. You go home and get some sleep and just—I dunno. Continue on with your life. You’ve done your part. Just like the others. This guy—he’s a Peter. You leave him up to me and B, yeah? That’s our burden to bear. You go home and you take your Matt and you guys will let us know the second we get a response and we’ll let you guys know the second anything happens with your friend, okay?”

Okay.

Yeah, no. That was okay. That was a fair trade.

“And no more crying, fuck. You’re gonna have me crying and Wade just left. Fuck. We should have kept Wade, he’s like, exactly the thing to fix crying.”

“You rang?”

No, the exact thing to fix crying was getting to see Tats scream and slip and nearly take the back of his head out on the sink. Wade evidently hadn’t gone too far. He crunched himself in through the sink window to watch Tats swear on the kitchen floor. He then looked up at Miles’s face and then very, very carefully pulled his arms in through the window.

He had a duck. The same duck. From a week ago.

He put the duck in Miles’s arms and instructed him via gestures to pet the duck. Miles didn’t know what else to do. He petted the duck.

Wade’s suit eyes squinted in joy.

“I’m calling him Bernard,” he said.

 


	12. evening out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’d put a little sticker with Miles’s messy spider drawn on it in marker over top of the chest of the Spiderman on his pen mug since Miles had last been home. 
> 
> Miles saw it and wanted to cry all over again.
> 
> “That’s a bummer,” Ganke said, “’Specially after you put all that work into it.”

They went home.

Matt told Miles before they parted ways for different trains, that if he ever needed anything, anything at all, to give him a call. Miles told him he would and made sure that he remembered that he was supposed to tell Miles if and when he heard back from the emails. Matt huffed at him and said he was dumb, not fucking stupid and Miles got a block away from the train station before he was overtaken from behind.

Crushed into a hug.

And then it was gone, just as fast as it had come.

He looked, stunned, over his shoulder, and saw the silhouette of a body disappearing over the edge of a roof.

Huh.

 

 

Ganke demanded to know where Spiderman was when Miles came back and was disappointed to hear that he was not guaranteed a safe return. But rather than falling into a sulk like Miles expected him to, he shrugged and went back to doing homework. He’d put a little sticker with Miles’s messy spider drawn on it in marker over top of the chest of the Spiderman on his pen mug since Miles had last been home.

Miles saw it and wanted to cry all over again.

“That’s a bummer,” Ganke said, “’Specially after you put all that work into it.”

Yeah.

Yeah it was, man.

“Also, I’ve covered for you for so long I think security thinks I killed you and hid the body.”

Miles laughed. It felt good.

“I’ll show up tomorrow as proof of your innocence,” he said.

“Yeah, you better.”

 

 

“Morales.”

“Uh.”

“Where on earth have you been?”

“Honestly, sir? Depressed.”

Silence.

The security guard went from angry to contrite. He awkwardly took a little step back.

“No further questions,” he said.

 

 

“Miles.”

UGH. You spend a few days bopping around different universes, come home and all anyone wants to do is give you the third degree.

“Yeah?”

His dad stood over him with crossed arms. Squinting. Thinking.

“Car,” he said.

UGH.

 

 

“Honey, when this happens, you need to _tell_ someone. An adult, preferably,” his mom lectured. Weekends were family times. Enforced family time, if his dad had anything to say about it. Miles wished he had siblings. Then he could kick their chair out from under them or something and get all this attention _off him._

“It was just a few days,” he grumbled instead, stabbing at salad and pickled vegetables on his plate.

“Just a few days this time, _mijo_ ; this kind of thing can turn into a much longer, much worse kind of thing if you’re not careful. Why don’t you stay home for the week? Would that help?”

No, because then he’d have to get up a whole hour earlier to deal with transit just to get to school. Hard pass.

“I’m fine, mom,” he drawled.

“Miles, if you feel uncomfortable or someone’s bullying you, you can tell us, son. That’s okay,” his dad said in what he thought was an open and comforting tone.

Miles pursed his lips.

Yeah, okay, Dad, he thought. Let me just tell you about the fact that I’ve spent the last week trying to help a revived, traumatized Peter Parker find his way out of multiple shitshows, one of which nearly killed our friend and his double. And by the way Dad, I’m terrified that Peter’s just going to ask to be killed all over again, even after one of his best friends has put his professional reputation on the line for him and oh yeah, _Dad_ , the same crazy lady who’s made herself the bane of Peter Parker’s existence and who nearly tanked two of my new friends also has a vendetta against me, myself.

So yeah, I’m a little stressed out right now, Dad. Maybe a little depressed. Just an eensy, weensy bit, though.

“I’m _fine_ ,” he said.

 

 

He even was, too, until that night at 11 o’clock. He’d curled up on the couch to watch a recorded soap with his mom; his phone went off.

He’d never gotten a text from this number before. It read: !!!

He texted back, ‘Who’s this?’ And just got a torrent of exclamation points.

Whoever it was wasn’t great at texting. He was halfway through a text stating that this person had the wrong number when a different kind of message came through.

A voice message.

He’d never gotten one through text before.

He clicked on it and held the phone to his ear.

“WE GOT HER,” Matt screamed in his ear.

“Oh dear,” his mom said on the other side of the couch, “Someone’s excited.”

Yeah.

It was Miles.

 

 

Matt talked at a rate of precisely two thousand words per minute when Miles snuck out to meet him. He was mostly inarticulate and definitely had come straight from home to do it. Miles knew this because while he was trying to wring actual words and events out of the guy in the semblance of an order, Mr. Nelson showed up, white as a sheet in the alley and then deflated in relief.

“Are you _crazy_?” he scolded Matt, valiantly ignoring Miles. “You just—right out a window, Matty. Someone could have seen you.”

Matt rattled at him and batted him away with half-apologies and promises that he’d be right back over.

“No.” Mr. Nelson grabbed his hands and shoved them back. “No, no. No. No more secrets, remember? None. What’s going—Miles?”

“WOW. Fogs, it’s hella late, you should go back in; I’ll literally be there in five minutes. GO,” Matt half-shouted, pushing at his friend’s shoulder without success.

“What on earth is going—hey, what the hell are you two doing?” Mr. Nelson said. He caught ahold of Matt’s left wrist and held it firmly. “Matthew. What is going on?”

Matt made a high-pitched frustrated sound and pulled his hand out of the grip without much trouble at all, but then he launched himself at Mr. Nelson and whispered frantically to him right by his ear. Miles could just barely keep himself from vibrating with anticipation.

“You—he— _what?_ ” Mr. Nelson said. He stared at Miles wide-eyed.

“Oh dear, Jesus, no. I’m—no, I’m not dealing with two of you,” he declared.

“ _Three_ ,” Matt told him with a stunning grin. He turned back to Miles.

“Editor said action has been taken and the other guy said he’s taking it to her institute. She’ll know exactly what’s up come morning.”

Holy shit.

That was excellent. But also not excellent.

“She’s gonna murder us,” he said.

“Oh, absolutely,” Matt agreed. “Lay low for a couple days, huh?”

Yeah, fucking roger that.

He’d pass on the message, too.

 

 

Miles woke up on Sunday and spent a bleary five minutes trying to find his other sock. Normally he didn’t care, but he liked this pair. They had bananas on them. Gwen had called them ‘cool.’

He heard talking downstairs and suddenly had a vivid memory of being one sock short on the couch, before he went to sleep. He went down on the hunt and stopped in the middle of the stairs in the living room. His dad stood by the couch with coffee in hand and eyebrows raised as far as they could go. His mom sat on the couch with her own cup of coffee in still shock.

“Uh? We good?” he asked.

The other two turned his way at the same time. Then back to the tv.

“—believed to have been killed in action. The coroner called his death traumatic and said that Mr. Parker had almost certainly died immediately following extreme blunt force trauma—”

Oh, sweet Jesus.

“—however the hero’s body, which was publicly entombed at a funeral attended by thousands of dedicated New Yorkers, was found today once again outside Mr. Parker’s former place of work, where it had been placed previously.”

Peter, you fucking drama queen.

“—found to be alive. Finger prints and dental records have verified this, although EMTs have reported his condition to be critical. The Parker family has not yet released a statement.”

Miles sniffed at the screen. Then spotted a hint of yellow and white under the pillow closest to his mom.

Aha!

His parents stared at him holding the sock.

“Miles, buddy, have some respect,” his dad said.

 

 

“Dad, if Spiderman’s back from the dead, do you have to arrest him for vigilantism?” Miles asked over his bowl of cereal. His dad had been on his phone all morning. His mom was absolutely beaming.

“I—hmm.”

Well done, Peter. You massive idiot. You went and broke the police department.

 

 

“Hey, I thought you said he didn’t have much of a chance of coming home,” Ganke accused him with an irritable pencil pointed in his direction the next day.

“He didn’t,” Miles said.

“Well obviously that didn’t pan out,” Ganke snapped, waving the pencil at the desk as a whole. “So either you lied or there’s something else going on here.”

Miles smirked and hid behind his book.

“Miles.”

He turned himself and his book the opposite direction.

“ _Miles_.”

 

 

He clung to the stairs until his dad got back from work that Friday. Didn’t need to be picked up from school, had practically run home himself. His mom kept telling him to tone it down a bit, but he _couldn’t_.

Peter had had his first interview with police that day. And Miles _needed_ to know how it had gone.

His dad watched his rattling with amusement and accepted the leech-hug affectionately.

“You’re really into Spiderman these days, huh, Miles?” he noted.

“He’s _cool_ ,” Miles lied. Lied like he’d been shot in the chest. Peter knew all the words to the Baby Shark song, whatever cool was, he went screaming in the opposite direction.

“He’s loopy,” his dad corrected. His mom made an interested sound. “Kid’s maybe 25, 26-ish. Just talks crazy, Rio. Kept forgetting where he started and stopped and who was in the room with him. Got some kind of—hmm.”

Miles vibrated. His mom leaned against the counter.

“Some kind of--?” she encouraged. His dad frowned deeply into his palm.

“Glitch?” he eventually said. “He glitches? Like a computer. Except you can see it. Colors and static—that kind of thing.”

“That’s…not normal,” Miles’s mom said diplomatically. Miles could barely contain himself.

“What’d he say?” he asked, “Is it really him?”

“Yeah, that’s what doctors are saying,” his dad said over his head to his mom. “They’ve moved him up to a SHIELD lab to take a better look at what’s going on.”

“Sounds painful.”

“I don’t know if it’s painful. His wife certainly thinks its painful for him; his aunt not so much. Bless that woman, though. She’s damn near the only thing keepin’ him on track. Leave him alone for two seconds and he picks up radio waves or something and starts singing and talking to people who aren’t there. He sure ain’t the same as he left.”

Woah. Had Peter somehow tapped into Spotify or something with his weird In Between cells? Maybe he could listen to podcasts remotely now.

“He competent to stand trial?” Miles’s mom asked. His dad grimaced.

“I don’t know if any case against him would go to trial,” he said. “It’s hard to charge someone, uh. Posthumously.”

“Did he really die, though?”

“They performed an autopsy on the kid, Rio. He was good and dead. He’s even still got some of the scars. Whoever it was that nabbed him pulled him right out of his grave.”

“ _Dad_ ,” Miles whined, “What. Did. He. Say?”

His dad laughed and waved him over. Miles went. Just about fell over himself doing so. Tucked himself good and close in the following hug.

“That’s classified,” his dad suddenly said.

UGH.

 

 

Matt was bummed and grumpy because he couldn’t see Peter either. He told Miles this while laying into a punching bag at the same gym that Mr. Murdock had tortured Tats in. It turned out it existed in their verse, too.

“It’s ‘cause MJ hates me,” he finally told Miles.

“She hates you?”

“Yeah.”

“What’d you do?”

“Flirted with her boo.”

“I thought you guys fooled around when they weren’t together.”

“We did.”

Miles looked up in sudden realization. He set down his textbook and glared.

“Don’t you have Mr. Nelson to flirt with?” he asked. Matt groaned and kicked the bag.

“He’s no fun. He doesn’t flirt back.”

Yeah, that’s about what Miles thought.

 

 

Peter stabilized enough in their verse to stop floating around and to finally point the finger at Doc Ock. It turned out that he was royally fucked up; his cells did not like to be in one verse for too long. He needed to hop around a bit and spend a couple hours in the In Between every few days to not become a space cadet.

SHIELD was extremely confused and concerned the first time he did it. He reported this because instead of jumping back into his fun, exciting cell back at their facilities, he hopped out of the In Between right into Fogwell’s gym and gave Matt a heart attack while he was trying to teach Miles how not to break his thumbs on a punch.

Matt threatened him with grievous bodily harm and then took a lap around the old boxing ring to collect himself.

Miles gave Peter the tightest hug he could manage and Peter hugged him back and rocked back and forth like he always did.

“You came home,” Miles said.

“Mmm, something like that,” Peter rumbled.

“Is your aunt mad?”

“Oho. _Pissed._ ”

“At you?”

“What? No. She told me she’s going to go all Silence of the Lambs on dear, old Liv.”

Ahaha, funny joke. Except Peter’s aunt would totally do it.

“Are you still float-y?” Miles asked. Peter pulled back from him. He didn’t seem too floaty. Not too glitchy either, since he’d just charged his cell battery or whatever it was he had to do now.

“Not so much,” he said. “But it comes and goes. Hey, did you know the internet’s connected throughout all the verses? Check it out.”

He showed Miles a phone that one of his people must have gotten for him and opened a Whats App message chat which was essentially a three-way panic attack between himself and the other Peters. Tats Spidey texted almost entirely in emojis and exclamation points. Peter B. was incapable of writing a sentence which had no misspellings.

“That’s way cool,” Miles told him. Somehow he just knew that the same wouldn’t work for him. Peter let him try to send a message and sure enough, it didn’t go through. He didn’t seem surprised.

“Doc Ock stuck me In Between,” he said. “And for better or worse, I think I’ve got two verses now. Here and the In Between. But when I’m in the In Between, I think I can—I haven’t tried yet—but I just got this feeling that I can go anywhere.” He smiled. “Anywhere they need a Spidey.”

Anywhere they need a Spidey?

“You’re not staying here?” Miles asked.

“I’m not not-staying,” Peter told him. “Talked it over with Tats and B.; you know, we got a Spidey for so many verses, but some of them could use a little help. They’re not all as good as you are, Miles. One kid straight up crashed a plane into Coney Island—can you imagine? Anyways there are those and then there are other verses where there’s no Spideys at all, and well, sometimes they could use a little help, too. So I guess you can think of me as your friendly, inter-dimensional, neighborhood Spiderman. And the this-verse part-timer if you need me, of course. Within reason. I might have sworn I wouldn’t do it anymore to a judge.”

That was crazy. Insane. Unbelievable.

And it made Miles laugh with joy because it was _perfect_.

“You’re gonna get arrested,” he said.

“ _You’re_ gonna get arrested,” Peter said. “I’m just going to get in trouble. Oh, hey Matt? Can you take my case against Ock?”

Matt glared his way between the ropes of the ring.

“I’m busy,” he said.

“Please?”

“Your wife hates me.”

“Psh, no she doesn’t. She just thinks you’re a flirt with no boundaries.”

“I _am_ a flirt with no boundaries.”

“Well maybe you two can make nice over the shared trauma of my untimely demise? And also my case against Ock?”

“UGH. I hate you. Go back to your middle Earth whatever.”

Peter had a winning smile in him.

“I love you.”

“Leave. I’m mentoring. Otherwise known as doing your fuckin’ job for you, you slacker.”

 

 

Miles opened his newsfeed a week later to huge headlines.

SPIDERMAN V. SCIENTIST: A CASE OF NECROMANCY?

Spiderman accuses Doctor of Malpractice—he is the evidence.

Former Superhero Permanently Disabled by Posthumous Abuse of Body

SPIDERMAN: Zombie or What?

 

He opened a text to Matt.

 **MM:** I thought you were a flirt with no boundaries

 **MM: [voice message]** Hey, did you know we have the same initials? Do you know how annoying that is?

 **MM:** is this a distraction tactic? Because it’s not working. Here, I’ll change you to DD in mine.

 **DD:** I AM SAVED. I’m putting you in as SM.

 **MM:** Do you actually have a case here?

 **DD:** **[voice message]** Digging up and experimenting on corpses is illegal in all fifty states, Miles. Do I have a case? Nonsense.

 **MM:** you know if he’s talked to the others?

 **DD:** negative.

 

He opened up a message to Peter.

 **MM:** congrats on your upcoming trial

 **PP:** thanks it’s the worst. People know my name on the street, is this what being famous is like? It sucks.

 **MM:** did you tell the others?

 **PP:** not officially, been busy trying to get my damn job back. And my stipend. And my degree? Lots to do.

 **MM:** I thought you were a part-timer?

 **PP:** Yeah. Part-time photographer. Part-time Grad Student. Part-time Spiderman. Hold on I just told the others, their chat is insane.

 **MM:** they have a chat?

 **PP:** yeah and it should be televised.

 **MM:** make us an interdimensional chat

 **PP:** oh sure, I’ll just put it on my list, yeah don’t you even worry

 **PP:** NO

 **PP:** I’m busy. You make one.

Miles laughed.

It was so nice to have him back.

 

 

Peter wasn’t home much. Miles was Spiderman almost all of the time. When he was home, Peter was a grad student who was hounded by the media and by a crew of relentless scientists begging him for blood samples.

He told them to talk to his wife.

His wife was a force of nature.

He officially introduced his MJ to Miles and she was very kind to Miles before whipping around and tearing Peter a new one for failing in his duties of mentorship. His defense was that he didn’t need to, Miles was doing just fine on his own, and anyways, he already had a mentor.

“WHO?” MJ demanded.

“Ma—no one.”

Oh, Peter. You’re so, so bad at this.

“MATT? Did you just fucking say _MATT_? HAVE YOU MET MATT? He. Is. _Blind_. Peter.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean anything. He’s still a ninj—nine-to-five kind of guy?"

Miles was gonna peace out. He had things to do. Villains to stop. Days to save.

“Matt’s a what? MATT’S A NINJA? HE’S DAREDEVIL ISN’T HE? You motherfucker. You _said_ you two were just friends.”

“Babe, we are.”

“You _said._ ”

“We _are_ , MJ. And anyways, he only flirts ‘cause he’s too repressed to tell Fogs how he feels.”

Silence.

“Oh my _god._ Foggy, _no._ Go save him.”

“What? Like, now?”

“GO.”

“Yes ma’am. Whatever you want, ma’am.”

God, that was something. They both needed to chill out. Miles told this to Peter B. and he laughed until he clutched at his face in horror and mumbled something about not being ready for the responsibility of being the most mature and stable Peter.

It could only be him, though, because Miles got a tap on the shoulder from Bitsy after a minute there with a polite request to help him hold down Tats while his nurse friend gave him a rabies shot. Apparently, Wade had tried and been unsuccessful and Bitsy could only keep one side of him down. He had two sides. Of course, Miles agreed to help.

Tats fought like the devil and hyperventilated at the sight of the needle and then it turned out that they didn’t need to have done any of that because he passed right the fuck out not two seconds before getting stuck. He woke up devastated but rabies-free.

Miles asked how he’d gotten bit to begin with and no one wanted to explain.

Eventually it came out.

Tats had gone out with friends, gotten absolutely smashed, then called everyone on the chat to tell them he loved them and, while doing that, had made friends with the cat outside his apartment.

Except that it wasn’t a cat. And it wasn’t a mutual friendship.

Raccoons, it turned out, were the only creature in the world which did not adore Tats on sight. He was displeased. He hissed out the raccoon outside his kitchen window and fit himself in the sink to maintain eye contact with them.

Peter B. cried upon receiving this news and fell into the arms of his far-too-intrigued wife. She decided she needed to know if _he_ could fit in _their_ sink.

He could not.

 

 

Miles then received word from Gwen, who was delighted with how things were going in his verse, but needed everyone to shut up so she could gloat to Miles about her latest escapade with a certain redhead who was avoiding the fuck out of her.

It was beautiful, she claimed. She just threatened to murder the DA when he overstepped.

And what was even more beautiful than stopping him in his tracks was the fact that he was very obviously confused as to why he was stopping in his tracks.

This last time, he’d thrown a hand over his shoulder and said, ‘fine, kill him, see if I care.’ And Gwen had waited a beat and then taken off running and sure enough, guess who suddenly had second thoughts.

She called Miles after the standoff the two of them had had in front of DA Nelson’s office. She said that DA Nelson had come out to see what all the fuss was about and Gwen had told him straight up that Murderdock was madly in love with him and it had gone down.

Strangely.

DA Nelson laughed and said that that was very cute and that she was very sweet and that Murderdock was way out of his league in more ways than one. And then he’d locked his door and left the two of them in the hallway, telling them not to break anything please.

And Murderdock had kind of gone comatose for a few seconds there.

Gwen had taken advantage of his distraction to leave him there. She was so happy. So proud of herself. She told Miles that she wanted to talk to Tats Spidey’s Mr. Murdock and Mr. Nelson more to exact more pointed retribution in the future.

Miles was. He was gonna let her do that. Whatever she wanted, actually. That was fine. Cool.

 

 

He decided, after about a month of these shenanigans—the rush of people, Spideys and others, in and out of his life. From Peni calling because Noir had disappeared in his verse, to Tats Spidey and his raccoon, to Gwen and Peter coming together to eventually force Peter B. to tell Miles exactly why he’d been incommunicado over the last few months, to Wade and Bitsy inviting Miles to just have dinner with them up high on one of their favorite perches--that it was a lot.

A lot of people.

A web of people.

And yeah, he was Spiderman. The one, the almost only.

But he’d never been less afraid and he’d never been less alone.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AND we're done. I couldn't bear to kill Peter again after all he's been through. 
> 
> Thanks everyone for your continued support throughout this piece! These last chapters were SUPER hard to write. But hey, you can't win them all. 
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who has commented, y'all are the lights of my life. Thanks also to all the lovely silent readers, y'all are great too! I hope to do a little more work in the ITSV crew in future, so don't think this is the last of them. In the meantime, Phew! I think I'm gonna take a break from chaptered fics for a minute.
> 
> Edit: OH SHIT y'all I totally forgot. I drew the Peters just fucking hanging out. Here, if you wanna see them they are right here: http://deniigi.tumblr.com/post/183223513892/


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